131–140 of 211 posts
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This is also driven by investor expectations. Not "business people".
A lot of this goes on inside departments where investors don't have any substantial insight.
Just in time manufacturing contributes a lot to this shortage. We rely so much on integrated supply chain logistics, the pandemic clearly brought in to focus the "optimizations" of JIT manufacturing. The lack of local supply pools as buffer is so short sighted.
I don't know much about how supply chains function so I am wondering how is just in time manufacturing still to blame when the chip shortage has been ongoing for over a year? Wouldn't everyone have burned through their inventory at this point?
The actual closings due to lockdown were only a couple of weeks in most industries. What really hurt imho was that orders were cancelled, production capability was scaled back, but demand came back faster than expected.
Just in time manufacturing contributes a lot to this shortage. We rely so much on integrated supply chain logistics, the pandemic clearly brought in to focus the "optimizations" of JIT manufacturing. The lack of local supply pools as buffer is so short sighted.
I keep seeing that argument every single time and keep wondering, isn’t there reason to implement JIT? Something like cost benefits outweigh the resilience risks? It’s not like people start dying on the streets, simply things are getting expensive and hard to get during disturbances. Are there calculations demonstrating that JIT the risks of optimization are more harmful than helpful in the long run?
The dysfunction is the accounting games that companies are incentivized to keep stuff off of their books. Every company wants to look like a software company and avoid stuff like inventory. Some of this is absurd - many companies don’t “own” property, for example, they lease through entities that are sometimes only nominally separate.
Sometimes companies will outsource processes and fulfillment to layers of other entities, each of which do the same thing. Disruptions cascade - I had one issue last year where a supplier’s supplier had issues getting boxes, and a two week delay there delayed downstream fulfillment by 6 weeks. All because the people who ship the end product couldn’t deliver, and the “principal” outsourced the actual management of the process to a third party. If the principal controlled it, they would have gotten it done, as they were punished severely by the contract penalties. They bet on everything working out ok and lost.
Just in time manufacturing contributes a lot to this shortage. We rely so much on integrated supply chain logistics, the pandemic clearly brought in to focus the "optimizations" of JIT manufacturing. The lack of local supply pools as buffer is so short sighted.
Not using just in time manufacturing might help with short-term disruptions, but we're approaching the two year point on the pandemic and the associated global disruptions and it's just not realistic to keep enough stock in for that long. The current generation of stuff like CPUs and GPUs hasn't even been released and in production for that long...
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It's a niche part and you shouldn't be surprised if it's discontinued soon. Think about migrating your design. I'm starting to see end-of-life notices for a lot of parts that I wouldn't normally see at their age, but if they're low runners that would totally make sense. If you see lead times longer than a year, that's your early warning.
I imagine one end result of this supply squeeze is that a lot of bespoke or legacy parts will be finally removed from designs that have up until now been "good enough". To cite the most common example, vehicle manufacturers' most common supply pain-point is ICs built on a ~200nm process, which was state of the art between 1996-2000. I understand it makes sense to move slower for chips embedded in long-life devices, a…
Whatever your opinion is about the lockdowns, there is one thing everyone should be able to agree on; they destabilize just about everything. I'm worried about people going hungry or not being able to heat their home this winter from the ripple effects.
I disagree, the system has been unstable for years, this was just the first Black Swan that happened to land and sent it crashing to the ground. This was always going to happen. Taleb et al have been warning about the fragility of our systems for decades now and that JIT and long supply chains have made things even worse. You're taking the wrong lesson from lockdowns.
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A lot of this goes on inside departments where investors don't have any substantial insight.
They do once a company gets additional funding and or when a company is bought. Investors tend to sit on the boards and yield significant power. You're not wrong, but I don't agree :)
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I know the benefits of having a buffer but do we need buffers everywhere? As in your example, wouldn't be much better to have a buffer in the hospitals(or maybe some kind of regional emergency organisations) as a precaution for an outbreak instead of advocating for buffers across the textile industry? I like the way you put it, JIT simply pushes the buffer elsewhere. However, this seems like a very good thing to have…
> I know the benefits of having a buffer but do we need buffers everywhere? As in your example, wouldn't be much better to have a buffer in the hospitals(or maybe some kind of regional emergency organisations) as a precaution for an outbreak instead of advocating for buffers across the textile industry? The problem with that specific kind of stockpile buffer is that it can become quickly depleted. No mask stockpile w…
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The reporting on this has been very weird. UK news had massive coverage of deaths in Italy, then when it started hitting the UK hard, it went invisible. I'm not sure the UK emergency Nightingale hospitals were actually _used_, since (obviously) you can repurpose a building but you can't just find a few thousand healthcare staff at short notice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56327214
I don't think the Nightingales were used much, but that was mostly because the existing hospitals managed to free up more beds than originally anticipated and all the available staff ended up there. Naturally, the government got endless flack for this, as is often the case when a government puts measures into place for a contingency that doesn't come to pass. (Also, relying on freeing up beds may not have been a good…
I’m not one to show much support for the current government but the negative (media) reaction to these hospitals not actually being needed was pretty short sighted.
We should be thankful that the hospitals were there and even more thankful that they weren’t needed.
There were more obvious things for which to hold the government to account.