Demand and Supply Chain Management in Small Advertising Agency

Study focused on demand and supply chain management of a small-sized Finnish advertising agency with goal to find out how these methods could be applied to the case enterprise’s processes. VOP and OPP concepts were used to analyze demand and supply chains of different customer projects. As result, four different demand chains were identified. The discovered VOPs were located at customer’s marketing strategy, at customer’s marketing planning process, at customer’s concept planning process, and at customers purchasing process. In first three of the found demand chains the OPPs were located on different stages of advertising agency’s planning or design process. In the fourth demand chain type, the OPP was located at the agency’s production processes. The present poor performance of the projects, where the VOP was located at the customer´s marketing strategy or planning processes, mainly resulted from misunderstandings of customer needs and quality problems during the projects. To tackle the performance issues the agency will need new operation model with quality check points in customer requirement definition and different planning processes.