Shipping Pte Ltd ventured into the logistics industry in April 2020 after the pandemic started. Their long-standing business in manufacturing plastic cups ground to a halt as their customers had progressively canceled all their orders from March 2020.

As 90% of their sales were to companies in Vietnam and Cambodia, they had to find alternative means or close their company down. So they started their high-tech logistics business in June 2020, where they offer packaging, pickups, shipping, delivery, and tracking services.

They converted their manufacturing premises to a warehouse cum logistics facility to cater to their new business venture. Since the start of the COVID pandemic last year, there has been an increase in online orders as more people have been working from home.

The company has been seeing double-digit growth every month, especially since online shopping platforms like Lazada and Shopee promote e-commerce aggressively. During the quarterly dialogue session with the Managing Director, staff expressed their unhappiness with their continued extended working hours due to a shortage of manpower.

Staff is taking multiple duties from inventory-taking, packing, and delivery. The overtime allowances were doubled, but the staff’s morale continued to decrease with increased medical leave and urgent leave requests in the last quarter.

The company has also been warned by Lazada and Shopee (their primary customers) that they will terminate their contracts as their customers have been complaining of wrong orders and missing items. This has further hampered the operations of the business.

Management wants you to put up a report to identify the possible root causes and propose a recommendation to improve the situation. The report should contain the following information:

1) methods (primary and secondary data) used to obtain data for this report,

2) findings from each method to support your recommendation,

3) possible solutions in your conclusion,

4) recommendation based on one of your proposed solutions.

5) all data deriving from the research, including supporting methods used, should be attached as an Annex to the report.