This question's explanation and your answers so far.
住宅建材の製造・販売を行う A 社は, 物流業務の問題と, それを解決するための改善案を取りまとめた。改善案を実現するために, システム化すべき機能として, 最も適切なものはどれか。 〔問題〕 営業所で商品を発注してから納品されるまでに数日掛かるので, 欠品を恐れた営業所が全取扱商品ごとに在庫を抱えてしまっている。その結果, A 社全体で多大な在庫コストが発生している。 〔改善案〕 営業地域の主要エリアに物流倉庫を設置して, 配送トラックを追加し, 営業所からの発注受付後, 当日中に配送ができるようにする。
The number of new housing construction starts is information useful for forecasting future demand, and it can serve a different improvement, namely raising the accuracy of demand forecasting. However, what the improvement plan lists is setting up warehouses, adding trucks, and same-day delivery, and looking up construction starts connects to none of them. Even if the forecast is accurate, same-day delivery will not be achieved unless a sales office's order reaches the warehouse. The question asks which function should be made into a system “in order to realize the improvement plan”, so a function outside the improvement plan cannot be the answer.
正解 The correct answer is イ. Among the improvement plans, “setting up distribution warehouses” and “adding delivery trucks” are about preparing facilities and vehicles, and they are not the part realized by an information system. What needs to be made into a system is the one remaining point, namely the flow of information required to make “delivery within the same day after receiving an order from a sales office” possible. To achieve same-day delivery, what a sales office orders must reach the distribution warehouse on the spot, so that the warehouse can immediately start picking and loading. If order forms are mailed, relayed by telephone or fax, or processed in a single batch once a day, it takes from half a day to several days for the order to reach the warehouse, and even adding trucks would not allow shipment on the same day. If a mechanism that instantly conveys a sales office's order details to the distribution warehouse is built, the lead time is shortened from several days to the same day, sales offices no longer need to hold inventory of every item out of fear of stockouts, and the enormous inventory costs mentioned in the [Problem] are eliminated as well. This is the only choice that corresponds one-to-one with the content of the improvement plan.
Grasping inventory costs only makes visible the current state of the enormous inventory costs raised as the [Problem]; it does not become a means of lowering the costs themselves. Moreover, the inventory here has piled up because of the logistics lead time of several days until delivery, so even if a store manager learns the amount, a sales office cannot reduce it on its own. What the improvement plan aims at is cutting inventory by shortening the lead time, and this is not a function needed to achieve that.
An analysis function for comparing the sales performance of each sales office is a function for executives to examine sales strategy and evaluate business results, and it has nothing to do with shortening the logistics lead time or reducing inventory. The improvement plan contains no element of analyzing sales performance at all. Since the question asks you to choose the function needed to realize the improvement plan, a discussion of management analysis is off the point.