Asia’s supply chain: Implications for rebalancing. Enterprise Resilience Management Blog: Supply Chain Evolution and Transformation. In a post entitled On the Bandwagon: Supply Chain Orchestration, among other discussed topics was Gartner's Four-Stage Maturity Model. The model (shown in the figure below) defines maturity in terms of organizational balance. In Stage 1 (reacting), organizations are trying to figure out where they are headed with goal being the development of an operational plan. In Stage 2 (anticipating), organizations try to match supply with demand. Gartner analysts believe that the bulk of companies continue to fall within this stage.
In Stage 3 (collaborating), organizations begin proactively working outside of corporate boundaries with other supply chain stakeholders. Gartner's is not the only "maturity model" available. The fact that the two models both perceive a significant barrier at the collaboration phase of maturity should give supply chain professionals some reason to pause. In other words, the Optimization 1.0 lasted for 50 years while Optimization 2.0 lasted for only 30 years. Where in the world could revolution strike next? I spoke today at a lunch about the effects of the market on the Middle East. What, the organisers wanted to know, did the Arab Spring mean for the markets? It’s an obvious question but I think it is slightly the wrong way around.
It isn’t the Arab Spring that is causing much in the markets. Instead, the markets have caused the Arab Spring. You can make a good case for the financial crisis having created a wave of fractures throughout the supply chain and cutting global capacity across the board. But, if you take into account the capacity lost either permanently, or at least for the medium term, that may not be the case. Halkin Services’ Peter Warburton thinks the latter – which is why, even in 2009 when the rest of the world was fussing about deflation, he was pointing to cost-push price inflation – inflation caused, not by an organic rise in demand, but by a troubled supply chain.
I suspect we’ll be seeing PhD papers analysing this for the next 40 odd years too. Not your average convenience store - Video - Small Business. Raul Ojeda started shining shoes at the age of 18. A decade later, with the help of his mentor, Willie, he owns his own small business. Goya says it became the U.S.'s biggest Hispanic-owned food company by catering to the tastes of varied Latin-American groups. The manufacturer of pianos has passed the skills of making the musical instrument generation after generation for over 150 years. For over 100 years, Crayola has mixed and molded crayons in the hopes of encouraging creativity in children. After raising chickens on a farm became a lonely task, Jim Herr purchased a small potato chip company and built it into a snack-making empire. Pink's Hot Dogs, the iconic Los Angeles eatery, opened in 1939 as a pushcart selling hot dogs for just ten cents. The customer review site started as a magazine and call-in service with Angie Hicks going door-to-door to get people to sign up for a subscription.
Northern Sky offers a train car charter that has four bedroom suites, a living room and a glass dome. Defining the Supply Chain. A senior IBM consultant who anonymously writes the blog @ Supply Chain Management, recently wrote a post that asks: What is the Supply Chain? [10 January 2011] The author decided that this is an intriguing question because it is so difficult to answer. The IBMer writes: "Do you know that this is the most frequently searched Google phrase that drives people to my site (and I'm sure very many other sites in this space as well)? Ah, this is easy enough to answer and so I posed the question to myself: What exactly is the Supply Chain? I must confess that I really couldn't come up with an answer that didn't suffer from some rebuttal or the other.
So I pose it to you as well – What is the Supply Chain? " David Blanchard, in his book entitled Supply Chain Management: Best Practices, asks the same question. "What exactly is a supply chain? Cute story, you say, but it gets us no closer to answering the question at hand; but, in a way its does. That's a pretty good description. More on Social Media and the Supply Chain. In a post entitled Social Media and the Supply Chain, I examined the views of a number of analysts who concluded that the future belongs to social commerce. At the end of that post, I indicated that I would, at a later date, discuss why some analysts believe that full-blown social commerce may be further in the future than some anticipate. What prompted me to reflect on this subject was an article in The Wall Street Journal ["Facebook Won't Become E-Commerce Force, Analyst Says," by Stu Woo, 7 April 2011].
One cannot discuss social media and not mention Facebook; so it seems natural that Facebook would also enter the conversation when talking about social commerce. In my previous post, I quoted supply chain analyst Lora Cecere who wrote, "Now we have channel proliferation with M-commerce through mobile [phones] and social commerce through Facebook. " "Mulpuru lays out her case in a report ... titled, 'Will Facebook Ever Drive eCommerce? ' Thinking Twice About Supply-Chain Layoffs. It's the most wonderful time of the year—or that's how the song goes. But this year's decline in retail sales has resulted in definitely uncheery employee layoffs and payroll cuts, a trend that is likely to continue. While the vicious cycle of declining sales and layoffs is to some degree unavoidable, research by HBS assistant professor Zeynep Ton suggests that retailers should make labor decisions thoughtfully. “Many retailers see labor more as a cost driver than a sales driver.”
Her advice: Consider the supply-chain foot soldiers—stock clerks, trucking coordinators, inventory managers—as potential profit drivers rather than the first troops to cut in a downturn. Ton's working paper, "The Effect of Labor on Profitability: The Role of Quality" [PDF], examines how mundane activities such as stocking shelves, setting up displays, labeling, and returning unsold merchandise to distribution centers can seriously affect an organization's bottom line and undermine its strategy.
Global imbalances and the paradox of thrift. Comment / Analysis - Industry left high and dry. Rethink over global supply chain strategy. The Users are the Suppliers. Very clear argument, reproduced in full, from Israel internet activist Hanan Cohen : “I want to suggest that for Facebook, Google, Twitter and companies like them, the users are the suppliers. In a production and a commercial process, several bodies and elements are involved: * Producers that utilize means of production * Suppliers of inputs to the production process * Customers that purchase products Let’s eliminate.
We (the users) are not the customers because we don’t pay for the products of those websites. What are the products? We are definitely not the means of production . We supply our personal information to those website that use it to target the ads to us in order for us to click them – which generates income to the websites. Our personal information is the input to making the products sold. As those sites usually do, they don’t pay us cash for our inputs. We feel that this is a fair deal. And here I connect with the description of Dave Winer – Users are Hamsters.
The Ecology of Supply Chains. Supply Webs: Beyond the Supply Chain. Wednesday There is an excellent story in today’s Financial Times by Peter Marsh, High and Dry, about supply chain lessons learned from the disruption following the Sendai earthquake and tsunami in Japan. As industries have relentlessly globalized their operations, supply chains have become increasingly global, increasingly important, and increasingly vulnerable.
I discussed this at some length in my Political Economy of Globalization, especially in Thesis 30 and 31, where I wrote: “The static model of globalization derived from a completed extrapolation of production geographically distributed according to comparative advantage and lowest opportunity cost is inherently unsustainable and would collapse spectacularly if it could be brought into being. But precisely because it is so vulnerable, it would never come to pass.” What I failed to note in this context is that, in order to determine the limits of the possible in terms of supply chain management, these limits will have to be tested.