Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Lack of Visibility Kills

I know it’s Saturday, and I know you’re probably expecting me to talk about something along the lines of Flaming Laptops since I usually take the day off from sourcing, but something happened this week that not only cost many large retailers a significant amount of money, but killed someone. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m referring to the E. coli outbreak that has hit 20 states (so far) as a result of tainted spinach.

Even though Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Safeway Inc., SuperValue Inc., and other major grocery chains stopped selling spinach and removed it from their shelves and salad bars, the problem is not over – since investigators still are not sure about the source of the problem, which they believe to be somewhere in California’s Monterey County, which grows more than half of the nation’s spinach crop.

The CNN article seems to suggest that the nation’s “fractured network” of food safety agencies is the problem – that they do not “communicate” well enough, implying that one of the agencies, or someone at one of the agencies, did not do their job. I do not think that is the problem. As far as I’m concerned, the problem lies with Wal-Mart, Safeway, SuperValue, and every other chain that sold the spinach. You should know who your suppliers are. You should be aware of their health and safety processes and policies. You should verify that they do regular health and safety inspections or do your own. Your supply chain should be visible to you and you should know that you can trust everyone in it and that everyone in it is doing their job.

It’s not just the benefits of global visibility, or the costs associated with having to trash or scrap and write-off a large buy since the quality was sub-par and the product unusable. In cases where you are producing a product for public consumption, lack of visibility, as this example clearly demonstrates, can produce a product so unsafe that someone dies. And that’s going to cost you a lot more than the high dollar lawsuit sure to come your way – it’s going to cost you brand image, customers, and if you’re the poor sap whose job it was to insure quality, a hell of a lot of sleep.

I’m not saying you need to rush out and buy a six, seven, or eight figure visibility solution (although I’m sure Apexon (acquired and merged with Infostretch in 2022) would love to talk to you if you thought that was the answer for you), although a solid visibility solution is definitely worth a reasonable investment, but that you need to develop a visibility mindset. Institute processes to make sure each supplier meets your health, safety, and quality requirements, perform your own random checks, make sure your suppliers do their checks when they say they do, and to the required level of quality, and, finally, make sure your suppliers have a culture of making sure their suppliers aspire to the same level of health, safety, and quality that they do. Visibility needs to permeate your supply chain to provide maximum benefit.

eyefortransport’s 2nd Supply Chain Directions Summit

As I mentioned in my post Supply Chain Direction: Collaboration is Key back in July, eyefortransport’s 2nd Supply Chain Directions Summit is coming up in November. This year it is being held at the Sofitel San Francisco Bay, Redwood, Hotel on November 28-29th in San Francisco, California.

Billed as the only event that gives you proven strategies to achieve a demand driven seamless supply chain through Collaboration, Forecasting, Inventory & Disruption Management, Data Integration, Top Sourcing & Outsourcing, as I stated in my previous post, what caught my attention was the speaker list, which reads like a who’s who list in the logistics and SCM trenches. In addition, attendees are going to be treated to case studies from Nokia on best practices in handling global transportation security, Coca Cola on delivery and inventory level optimization, Michelin on RFID implementation, intel on 3PL costs, Nike on 3PL lessons learned, the Gap on turning security requirements to your advantage, and M-I SWACO on multi-tiered supply chain management as well as panel sessions on the creation of a proactive demand-driven value-creating supply chain, global sourcing options, outsourcing logistics strategies, and supply chain immunization.

If you’ve kept up with SourcingInnovation and e-Sourcing Forum over the summer, you’ll notice that these are all topics I’ve spent a considerable amount of time on (especially in my weekend series) and all vital to your continued supply chain success. I know there are a lot of supply chain (related) events being held annually (but given the speaker line up and the topics being focused on, I don’t see how you could afford to ignore this one, especially since, to the best of my knowledge, it does not conflict with any other significant supply chain event. (Feel free to email me to have your event added to the list!) Check it out, and feel free to contact the Events Director, Rodrigo Canete if you have any questions about the 2nd Supply Chain Directions Summit.

Why it’s just easier to do your job

It’s my day off (from sourcing), and this week I’m going to attack all those stupid How To Do Nothing at Work and Get Away With it lists. The latest one that was brought to my attention was one at FullDuplex.org

Their top 10 list goes as follows:

  1. Look Busy
  2. Look Stressed
  3. Speak Quickly
  4. Hide
  5. Break a Limb
  6. Make Excuses
  7. Never Leave Your Office/Room
  8. What they can’t see
  9. Fool their eyes
  10. Choose a profession people don’t understand

As far as I’m concerned, this is more work than just doing my job. After all, the only way you can truly get away with not working for any reasonable amount of time is to convince people you actually are working around the clock. This requires keeping up appearances, and most of the above suggestions require an awful lot of work. Let’s examine them one by one.

  1. Look Busy
    This requires always having potentially relevant materials in hand, a lot of flustery movement, and good acting. You’ll have to spend time collecting relevant materials, keeping in shape, and taking acting classes.
  2. Look Stressed
    Either you take acting classes, or you get stressed out trying to look stressed all the time – the first is work, and the second requires a good workout to get out.
  3. Speak Quickly
    Auctioneer classes.
  4. Hide
    Lots of time exploring the work area and observing your coworkers habits to determine where you can hide and when the best time to hide there is.
  5. Break a Limb
    Either you put yourself through pain and agony, or get a fake cast and put yourself through pain and agony. Work however you look at it.
  6. Make Excuses
    You’ll have to track which excuses you use when, as you only have so many relatives who can get sick/die so many times, and after a while, you’ll have to do some serious research to come up with new, plausible excuses.
  7. Never Leave Your Office/Room
    Well, I lied – this one isn’t work, unless you count the therapy you are going to have to undergo to combat the anti-social phobias you’re going to develop as a result of this one.
  8. What they can’t see
    Well, I guess this isn’t too much work after you rearrange your office, but you’re going to have to practice those very concerned looks to make sure people hurriedly walk away and don’t try to sneak a peak. But then you’ll be shunned, become an anti-social recluse, never leave your office/room, and we are back to our previous problem.
  9. Fool their eyes
    Now you have to setup quick-switch programs and shortcuts to switch to real work in a flash and either constantly listen / watch for visitors or install monitoring software and hardware to let you know when someone is close. Plus, you’re going to have to work on your multi-tasking skills to remember where you switch from and what you switched to.
  10. Choose a profession people don’t understand
    Problem here is that you have to understand it, or you’ll get found out – and if very few people understand it, it’s probably very hard and a lot of work, which is what you were trying to avoid in the first place.

Well, I hope I’ve convinced you that these lists are a waste of time and that it’s probably just easier to do your job and, more importantly, given you the confidence to tell the next person who sends you one of these lists to stop wasting time and do their damn job!

Have a great weekend!

Ailse Warfare in China?

Another very interesting article in the Economist last month was an article on retailing in China entitled Ready for warfare in the aisles that indicated that not only is China a market of unprecedented opportunity for both domestic and foreign retailers, but it is also a battleground where only the strong will surive.

At the same time that China is trying to become an innovation-based knowledge economy, it is also transitioning to a westernized mass-production and mass-consumption society. According to the article, China’s retail sales are set to expand by 13% to the equivalent of $860 billion this year, making the mainland the world’s seventh-largest retail market. Furthermore, there are now over 1,000 foreign retailers in China compared with just 314 two years ago. This is a stark contrast to traditional retailing in China where the majority of stores are tiny, family run outfits. Even today, China’s top 100 chains account for just a tenth of total retail sales. But it appears that local and foreign investors are eager to change all of that.

However, it appears the local competition is not taking it very well. The article points out that Crippling price discounts can be accompanied by dirty tactics: some stores send fake “customers” to rivals’ new stores to snap up all the promotions before genuine customers can get them. Another trick is to jam the doors of the lockers used by shoppers to store their purchases.

Nonetheless, given that suppliers can pay heavily to place their goods on retailers’ shelves, lease space for in-store displays, help pay for promotions, and give rebates, international chains are still eager to enter the market as these conditions can allow them to be profitable in their first year.

So what does this mean for your supply chain? I’d conjecture that it means two things. One: as the China retail market expands, you might find that you’ll be low cost country sourcing in other parts of Asia for your growing China market while volume-based low-cost country sourcing in China for your North American market and Two: when securing partnerships with local retailers, be sure to factor in all of the incidental costs and fees that will be required to successfully promote your products. Beyond that, I’d say it’s hard to tell … the huge influx of foreign retailers is going to drastically change the market, but I’m betting even the economists are having trouble predicting precisely how, and when, everything is going to happen. But it is going to impact your China supply chain, and is worth keeping tabs on.

The green city of the future

Since we should all be Living Green all the time, it’s time for another post in the green series. Since my last post, it’s been a little quiet on the blogs on the green front, but lots has been happening. On a positive note, a recent article on CNet reports that investments in clean tech have climbed rapidly in the last two years, from less than $300 million in the second quarter of 2004 to more than $840 million in the second quarter of this year.

First of all, I’d like to point out that News.com is following the lead of the Green Thinking bloggers everywhere and devoting special coverage in their special Green Tech section which notes that from solar-powered Wi-Fi to robots fueled by bacteria, researchers are rethinking the way we power our lives.

With articles on Clean Energy, Solar Wi-Fi, and Ethanol BioFuel, you know you can at least clean up the way you operate your business even if you don’t immediately cut costs from your supply chain in the process.

However, one recent article that really caught my attention is the one about the biodegradable forks manufactured by Cereplast. Cereplast’s plastic is composed of organic material and the items made from it will dissolve in a compost pile in 180 days or less. Compare that to regular plastic, which can take 100 years or more. The reality is that we have morphed into a disposable society, and if we aren’t going to change our ways, we should at least make sure we don’t continue to damage the environment with our actions. Moreover, if you can’t save money, you can always make decisions that will make money by designing products that will be perceived as more valuable and sell better in the marketplace, especially when it doesn’t cost you to do so. As the article notes, a pound of Cereplast’s resin sells for around 58 to 60 cents while a pound of petroleum-based polystyrene, meanwhile, sells for around 60 cents.

Another article that caught my attention was the Business 2.0 article that told us How Australia got hot for solar power. It seems that Australia is planning to build a 1,600 foot-tall solar tower that can power a small city. More precisely, a 260-foot-diameter cylinder taller than the Sears Tower encircled by a two-mile-diameter transparent canopy at ground level.

About 8 feet tall at the perimeter, the solar collector will gradually slope up to a height of 50 to 60 feet at the tower’s base. Acting as a giant greenhouse, the solar collector will superheat the air with radiation from the sun. Hot air rises, naturally, and the tower will operate as a giant vacuum. As the air is sucked into the tower, it will produce wind to power an array of turbine generators clustered around the structure. The result: enough clean, green electricity to power some 100,000 homes without producing a particle of pollution or a wisp of planet-warming gases. Mix in a few green roofs and some ground heat pumps, and you’re on your way to your perfect pollution free city (as long as the automotive manufacturers step up their clean car initiatives and produce enough hybrid biofuel/electric vehicles to meet the population demand, after all we can build biodiesel boats. (Alternatively, maybe someone will figure out how to scale up hydrogen fuel cells.)

Maybe my fellow blogging thunder from down under will jump in and add his thoughts to the project and the ongoing cross-blog green series (which also includes Supply Excellence and e-Sourcing Forum, on occasion) now that he’s back in the blogsphere.