The hierarchy of the Meditech management is such that it is headed by the VP of operations, who leads the plant managers and the director of materials management from the procurement side of the business, and the director of planning and distribution from the supply side of the business. The director of the planning and distribution headed the central planning managers, the customer service managers as well as the inventory managers, and the logistics managers. Dan Franklin was the Customer Service Manager at Meditech who was the first person to recognize the issues being faced by the Meditech Company.
The reason why the customer service manager was the first person to discover and identify the problems being faced by the Meditech company was mostly because of the fact that he, along with others in his department, were directly in interaction with the customers. Whenever the orders placed by the customers for new products got delayed, the manager and his team were the first people to be approached and informed of the problem by the customers and their representatives. This caused a flow of events in which the customer service manager sought the logistics manager for the status of the orders and what was causing the delay. This revealed that the orders were held up due to insufficient production and inventory of the finished goods for new products on the part of the Meditech Company to fulfill the orders being placed by the dealers and the affiliates. This was confirmed through the inventory manager by the customer service manager, who would provide the reason for the unavailability of the inventory to satisfy the orders as being the improper forecasting of demand on the part of the supply management and planning department.
Aside from this, the Customer Service manager was also privy to information regarding the piling up of finished goods inventory for established and non-introduction products at Meditech as the inventory manager would inform the management about the high costs of managing the inventory while insufficient orders were being received by the company to revolve and rotate this inventory in the distribution network. As the duty of the Customer Service Manager is to determine the quality and standards of the products which are disseminated in the market, he was also the first one to recognize the trend of stockpiling of finished goods in the inventory of Meditech.
