Comprehensive Analysis of Husky Company's Supply Chain Management

This project delves into the supply chain management of Husky Company Limited, a major Canadian energy firm. The analysis begins with an examination of the company's competitive strategies, highlighting cost leadership, differentiation, and cost focus. It then identifies key competitive priorities such as cost, quality, flexibility, time, and innovation, assessing their importance to Husky. The project further explores order winners and qualifiers within the company's operations. A supply chain sketch is presented, followed by an evaluation of the alignment between the supply chain and operations design. Finally, the report identifies and discusses two significant supply chain risks, known-unknown and unknown-unknown, proposing mitigation techniques for each. The project emphasizes the interconnectedness of these elements in achieving effective supply chain management, supporting the company's overall goals.

Running head: SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
Supply Chain Management: Husky Company Ltd
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note:

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................2
1. Competitive Strategy of the Company...............................................................................2
2. Importance of Competitive Priorities.................................................................................3
3. Order Winners and Order Qualifiers..................................................................................4
4. Supply Chain of the Company...........................................................................................4
5. Alignment of Supply Chain and Operations Design..........................................................5
6. Two Significant Supply Chain Risks with Mitigation Techniques....................................5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................6
References..................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
Supply chain management or SCM can be stated as the major management for the
flow of goods or services that includes storage and movement for raw materials of the work
in process inventory. The finished goods from the point of origin until the point of
consumption are also involved in the supply chain management (Christopher, 2016). The
following report outlines a brief discussion on the supply chain management of Husky
Company Limited. It is one of the largest energy companies in Canada, which has shares in
Toronto Stock Exchange. This report focuses on the competitive strategies, supply chain and
risks for this company.
Discussion
1. Competitive Strategy of the Company
Competitive strategies are the long term plans for any specific organization for the
core purpose of gaining several competitive advantages over the competitors within the
respective industry. Husky Company Limited comprises of several important and significant
competitive strategies that make the company extremely popular and noteworthy amongst the
other organizations (Husky Energy., 2018). The major competitive strategies of this particular
organizations are as follows:
i) Strategy of Cost Leadership: The first and the foremost competitive strategy of
Husky Company Limited is the strategy for cost leadership. It is the tough strategy for
implementation since it needs the long term commitment to sell the services or products at
lower costs (Jacobs, Chase & Lummus, 2014). The respective challenge for Husky Company
Limited is to produce and provide the services and products at extremely lower price. If this
is not being followed, they would be losing their profit margin.

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ii) Strategy of Differentiation: The second important competitive strategy is for
differentiation. The organization of Husky Company often identify a specific characteristic or
attribute, which makes the service or product absolutely unique and this is the basic driving
factor for their differentiation strategy. Since, Husky produces oil or natural gases for the
customers, they try to make their products much effective and efficient than the other existing
companies.
iii) Strategy for Cost Focus: This particular strategy of cost focus is much similar to
the cost leadership. The main difference between the costs focus strategy and cost leadership
strategy is that within the costs focus strategy, the business majorly targets on the specified
market segment and then offers that the market has the lowest cost available (Monczka et al.,
2015). The fact that the organization of Husky is more likely to produce the oil and natural
gas effectively for the customers.
2. Importance of Competitive Priorities
The competitive priorities are the major or critical operational dimension, the process
as well as supply chain should possess for the purpose of satisfying the external or internal
customers for both current time and future time. The most significant competitive priorities
for the Husky Company Limited are cost, quality, flexibility, time and innovation. The main
dimensions of quality are performance, features, reliability, conformance, technical
durability, aesthetics and perceived quality (Seuring, 2013). For time, the major dimensions
are manufacturing lead time, performance of due date, delivery frequency and rate of
production introduction. Husky Company Ltd has also focused on the dimensions of cost and
price. The major dimensions of cost and price are manufacturing cost, selling price, service
costs, running costs and profit. The dimensions of flexibility for Husky Company Ltd are
material quality, output quality, new product, deliverability, product mix, volume and
resource mix.

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3. Order Winners and Order Qualifiers
The order winner is the characteristic, which would win the customer’s purchase or
bid. These order winners are competitive benefits like quality, product designing, and
reliability, speed of delivery or images for causing the customers of the company to choose
the services and products (Ahi & Searcy, 2013). This is the major reason why any customer
purchases the products of the company. The various operations people for Husky Company
Limited are major responsible to provide the significant criteria of order winning. These
criteria are then identified by core marketing and this organization enable products for
winning the orders in market place. The process eventually starts with the subsequent strategy
and then with the criteria that the company would be keeping the organization running. On
the other hand, order qualifiers are the significant competitive benefits, which any
organization would demonstrate for being a viable competitor within the business sector
(Brandenburg et al., 2014). For oil and gas industry, Husky Company Limited is one of the
significant and large competitor for other organizations.
4. Supply Chain of the Company
Husky Company Limited majorly evaluates the several potential suppliers for the
purpose of ensuring compliance with the requirements. The major areas of supply chain
management are systems engineering, procurement, operations management, industrial
engineering, and marketing and information technology. The interlinked as well as
interconnected networks, node businesses and channels are combined within the core
provision of services and products needed by the end customers within the respective supply
chain (Hugos, 2018). The business logistics management is the proper distribution and
production procedure in the organization. The supply chain management involves
manufacturers, retailers and suppliers, who could distribute their products to the respective
end customers. Husky Company Limited has their own unique supply chain and hence they

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make sure that the supplies are not stopped under any circumstances. For maintaining the
supply chain of this specific organization, they ensure that the logistics or production is not
hampered at any cost. They produce proper products and services to the customers.
5. Alignment of Supply Chain and Operations Design
Most of the strategies play the most significant roles when the industry becomes
extremely competitive and the various consumers are provided with the same products
(Wisner, Tan & Leong, 2014). There is subsequent alignment of supply chain and operations
design of Husky Company Limited. The supplier is the party, who supplies services and
goods. This supplier might be identified from the contractor or subcontractor and they add
specialized input to the deliverables. Husky has two types of supplies of new and existing.
For the existing suppliers with the valid contract, Husky ensures that the procurement
processes are seamless and they meet every requirement. This organization utilizes the third
party application, known as Cortex for automating the invoices. The inbound and outbound
inventories are also managed effectively and efficiently in this energy company (Pagell &
Shevchenko, 2014). For the purpose of manufacturing, Husky uses lean technique for
forecasting the implications properly. Being one the largest organizations in Canada, they
always have excess capacity.
6. Two Significant Supply Chain Risks with Mitigation Techniques
There are two types of supply chain risks in Husky Company Limited, called known-
unknown and unknown-unknown risk.
i) The known-unknown risks could not be correctly measured by the risk management
system. This type of risk arises for expected imperfections within the model of risk
measurement (Christopher, 2016). Few parameters are left for measurement process
complexities. This risk can be mitigated by involving liquidity to the company.

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ii) The unknown-unknown risks arise for causes of losses and on the basis of the
factors, which could not be determined easily. For Husky Company Ltd, the unknown-
unknown risks could not be predicted under any circumstance and these risks could not be
measured properly (Seuring et al., 2013). The eradication of forced sales in Husky could
result in mitigation of this risk.
Conclusion
Therefore, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that supply chain
management is the designing, planning, executing, controlling and finally monitoring of the
activities of supply chain with the core objective to create the net value and hence building
competitive infrastructures as well as leveraging the worldwide logistics or measurement of
performance globally. The above report has properly and clearly stated about supply chain
management in Husky Company Limited. The main products of this particular organization
are oil, asphalt, natural gas as well as associated products. This report has also described
regarding competitive strategies, order winners, order qualifiers, supply chain as well as risks
of supply chain for this organization of Husky Company Limited.

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References
Ahi, P., & Searcy, C. (2013). A comparative literature analysis of definitions for green and
sustainable supply chain management. Journal of cleaner production, 52, 329-341.
Brandenburg, M., Govindan, K., Sarkis, J., & Seuring, S. (2014). Quantitative models for
sustainable supply chain management: Developments and directions. European
journal of operational research, 233(2), 299-312.
Christopher, M. (2016). Logistics & supply chain management. Pearson UK.
Hugos, M. H. (2018). Essentials of supply chain management. John Wiley & Sons.
Husky Energy. (2018). Husky Energy. Retrieved from http://www.huskyenergy.ca/
Jacobs, F. R., Chase, R. B., & Lummus, R. R. (2014). Operations and supply chain
management (pp. 533-535). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.
Monczka, R. M., Handfield, R. B., Giunipero, L. C., & Patterson, J. L. (2015). Purchasing
and supply chain management. Cengage Learning.
Pagell, M., & Shevchenko, A. (2014). Why research in sustainable supply chain management
should have no future. Journal of supply chain management, 50(1), 44-55.
Seuring, S. (2013). A review of modeling approaches for sustainable supply chain
management. Decision support systems, 54(4), 1513-1520.
Wisner, J. D., Tan, K. C., & Leong, G. K. (2014). Principles of supply chain management: A
balanced approach. Cengage Learning.