| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 工業管理研究所碩士在職專班 === 100 === Copper is used in many industrial applications. Due to the strong growth of the economic development in the emerging markets, the demand for copper was continuously increasing and this was driving up the price. Then due to the worldwide financial crisis the copper price came under pressure. For example in March 2008 the average price for cooper was at $8,439 per ton, only 9 months later the price dropped to $3,000 per ton. This is a simple example of how important it is to have a good procurement process in place.
The case company analysis the problems of current procurement process and proposes improvement by: Understanding the influencing factors for the copper price by identifying five major influencing factors. These are the London Metal Exchange (LME) price, LME stocks, gold price, oil price and the U.S. industrial production index (IPI). Each of these five factors can have a significant influence on the copper price, we use their positive or negative relationship with copper price, to establish the purchasing model of copper.
According to the study, the purchasing model will be very effective when the copper price fluctuates significantly, once the price starts to decline, the spot price will be more favorable, Then it is time to increase the purchasing volume or create a contract with long-term price fixing and it is recommended to use more scrap metal when applying the 15-days average price to wait for a better copper price .On the contrary, once the price is increasing, the 15-days average price is relatively low, then the spot price order has to be sent before the potential rise of the copper price or increase the order frequency to reduce the risks.
The purchasers learn about the international economic development by monitoring the five influencing factors which are the base to judge the future trend of the copper price. The procurement costs of the case company dropped 2.79% by using the purchase model which has been applied for this study. This procurement process does not only improve the profitability of the case company, it may be a general procurement process for most of the related industrial businesses.
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