Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
sloanreview.mit.edu
Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
1–10 of 322 posts
Re: Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
#2Having such reserve knowledge and experience is invaluable to national security, justified even under subsidy. Especially for critical supplies like semiconductors and medicine.
Re: Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
#3It seems to me like the problem is just that supply chains aren’t legible. I forget where I read this from, but Walmart or Amazon would easily pay billions of dollars to know which shipments won’t arrive over the next few months because of the rolling wave of factory shutdowns.
Once you have that legibility, the extra step of snipping the globalized supply chains seems unnecessary. Some businesses will plan to maintain continuity with all international shipping stopped, and a few will receive subsidies and mandates to do so. Others won’t, and that’s fine too; there’s a ton of value in making our lives better even in ways that can’t be sustained during a crisis. (It’s worth noting that international shipping in everything but coronavirus-fighting medical equipment hasn’t stopped during the currrent crisis.)
Re: Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
#4The actual title is "Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?" which doesn't use a question mark after a statement.
Re: Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
#5It seems to me like the problem is just that supply chains aren’t legible. I forget where I read this from, but Walmart or Amazon would easily pay billions of dollars to know which shipments won’t arrive over the next few months because of the rolling wave of factory shutdowns. Once you have that legibility, the extra step of snipping the globalized supply chains seems unnecessary. Some businesses will plan to mainta…
> It seems to me like the problem is just that supply chains aren’t legible.
There are a number of efforts to make supply chains in all sorts of sectors more transparent using blockchain-like protocols. So this will hopefully improve in the future.
Re: Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
#6The actual title is "Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?" which doesn't use a question mark after a statement.
this may be the first article that does not fulfill Betteridges law of headlines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...
Re: Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
#7If you think about it, cloud services add another layer in the supply chain. For example, just think about a UK company buying cloud services from a US company who buys hard drives from a company in Thailand. Now, you’re affected not only by the floods in Thailand in 2012, but you’re affected by natural disasters in the US as well. Even if you’re not using US data centers, they’re part of the control plane for the data centers in Europe.
Re: Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
#8My feeling as a layman is that the scale of globalization an industry uses will emerge naturally as a result of the trade-off between the costs and benefits. So far, the benefits have been worth it, otherwise companies wouldn't do it. As the article notes, there are a number of examples where safeguards are already in place, for in those cases it's worth being cautious.
The more serious, but harder to deal with, issue is that globalization lets companies indirectly exploit labor and environment in a way that their home region would not allow. Until this is sufficiently economically disincentivized, it will continue.
Re: Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
#9It seems to me like the problem is just that supply chains aren’t legible. I forget where I read this from, but Walmart or Amazon would easily pay billions of dollars to know which shipments won’t arrive over the next few months because of the rolling wave of factory shutdowns. Once you have that legibility, the extra step of snipping the globalized supply chains seems unnecessary. Some businesses will plan to mainta…
> It seems to me like the problem is just that supply chains aren’t legible. There are a number of efforts to make supply chains in all sorts of sectors more transparent using blockchain-like protocols. So this will hopefully improve in the future.
Agreed. Applying Merkle trees to supply chain management is a great idea that deserves a catchy name, although it's unfortunate the idea has been so historically intermixed with weird currency plays and ICO scams.
Re: Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?
#10That's silly, you can easily fix the problem by using a subscription only on staples like food. That way they can't surge the supplies and you end up with one guy getting all the eggs and reselling them.