公認会計士 依田康志事務所

Yoda Accounting Office extends its deepest condolences to all those affected by earthquake, especially those who have lost loved ones.

Today, I went to a convenience store. Goods were filled on selves and their operations are now being recovered as usual.
I bought a pastry there.

The operations being recovered should required great efforts of many people.
The pastry was made after such complicated and various processes of SCM.

You can bake a piece of bread from flour, water and yeast. But they are not enough if you want to sell the bread as a retail product.
You may require clean plastic case to warp, crate to contain, and a smooth efficient logistic system to deliver the product to a retail store.
And a sticker on the wrap. It is just a sticker, but you cannot sell the product without the sticker, which is against Food Sanitation Act.

When the SCM runs smoothly, everything above flows without any troubles and you may not see even a piece of them.
Meanwhile the SCM is confused in such situations, and some of processes are not recovered yet. A product cannot be delivered if even one of rings is missed.

I imagine there should be amount of losses made when this little pastry was delivered to the store as usual.

Generally a company implements very strict quality standards like;
– No delivery if an outer carton has dirt
– No delivery if a label is not straight or with scuff.
– A material XX has to be controlled under XX degrees Celsius and input to a process within XX minutes after delivery
– Whole process has to be completed withing XX minutes after input
, etc.

Under such circumstances, the carton might have dirt, manufacturing equipment might be unstable, or the label might not be straight. Cream for the pastry might be disposed due to temperature increase after the power outage.
Also many defects out of standard might be disposed due to the outage after valuable materials were delivered with valuable gasoline and input.

For disaster recovery effort, we expect products to be supplied as much as possible with the supply capacity to be recovered as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, under such circumstances it is very difficult to produce products with low defect ratio as usual. It should be accepted that the valuable resource may be wasted, while the wasted resource may be used for another urgent product.

The standards can be eased not to waste such valuable resources. Dirt or scuff on outer cartons may not affect on the product quality itself. Usually such standards may have high margins and such ease may not always immediately cause accidents. However such departure from the strict standards may be accused by public that the company would cheat consumers under confusion.

The production may be deferred rather than wasting valuable resources for normal production, but supply responsibility will not be performed to save lives.

All options above have pros and cons and there is no absolute right answer. However, as a matter of fact, either of them has to be accepted to respond to the public demand.

I was thinking about the background of the SCM when I picked a little pastry at a store. May the SCM be recovered as soon as possible.