A company is facing supply chain issues with their two product lines. The increased demand has challenged suppliers.

The first product line they have a supplier that they buy 60% of their product from. The Buy to make is 85 to 15. This supplier is going out of business within the next year to liquidate their assets. They plan to shift the work to a local supplier, but the local supplier is small and cannot keep up with Quality measures because they are used to working on a smaller scale and less critical items. This company is concerned with overhead costs and cannot hire support and probably will not make OTD which is critical to the operation.

The second product line is new and more high tech. They have a new supplier for some computer software machines, but they failed an audit and must stop shipments and recieve everything back for a quality check. The rest of the machines are supplied by foreign suppliers.

Another issue is that the company does not have enough space to manufacture both products.

1) Should they have the Low tech suppliers absorb the high tech suppliers responsibilities? How could they integrate the low tech production line to accommodate the high tech one?

2) What are some suggestions to improve the companies main issues like operations, supply chain, and customer relations? Also, how could they improve their production lines?

3) A possible solution is Move the high tech product line facility to a new location. Due to tax incentives, the new facility would be very cost-efficient. The low tech product line would not be affected by this move. However, suppliers would need to send components to two different locations and quality would suffer due to increased complexity. The high tech line delivery dates would not be affected.

Should they do this?

- Any help / advice for the company would be appriciated!