A Fascinating Recount of the US Semiconductor History
I recently read a book titled “The Microchip Revolution: A Brief History” authored by Luc Oliver Bauer & E. Marshall Wilder. It has lots of interesting...
Category
operations management
A Small Innovation, A Big Saving for the Environment
Just a couple of days, I received my new iPhone shipped from Apple. What I was impressed with was not the phone – the phone was good by all means but it was the clever...
Zillow’s Failure in Housing Flipping is a Classic Example of Ignoring Bottlenecks and Variabilities
By now, we have all heard the story of Zillow losing more than $550 million doing house-flipping. Its CEO blamed it on its forecasting model that produced house-buying prices...
How to Revive the Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry in the US
Before we talk about the “How”, we need to first understand why we need to revive the semiconductor manufacturing in the US. First of all, it is the foundation of...
Port of LA: Storage Space is the culprit?
Recently I read about the saga at the Port of LA. According to Ryan Petersen, the chief executive of logistics company Flexport, the real bottleneck at the Port of LA was...
Why Additive Manufacturing (or 3D Printing)?
[Header image credit: Wikipedia] I have been interested in 3D printing (the technical name should be “Additive Manufacturing”) for the last 10 years, but why can...
Why Supply Chain Delays are Multi-faceted: A Mathematical Explanations (Without the Heavy Math)
Paul Krugman recently penned an excellent article explaining why we see the supply chain snarls in New York Times. It mentioned a number of factors: The US consumers are...
A great article on this thing called “supply chain shortage”
By now, people should have already heard many times the term “supply chain shortage” in various settings: semiconductor chips, ports, airfreights, toilet papers....
Simulation: Is demand equal to sales? (Part II, and why is there a Loch Ness Monster?)
In an earlier post, we discussed the difference between demand and sales using a simulation exercise. Now the question is: How can we visualize the difference? To start off,...
Elon Musk Gets Manufacturing
Why is large-scale manufacturing hard? This is one thing that many people do not quite grasp. And indeed it can be hard to explain, because there are a number of governing...