Category: supply chain
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Supply Chain Woes Turns Out to be the Main Culprit of COVID-era Inflation
Inflation can occur when too much money chases too few goods and services, but it can also result from supply disruptions, rising production costs, or global economic shocks. It suggests that inflation can come from either the demand side (a surge in demand or money), or the supply side (a shortage of supply). So here…
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The American Civil War was a War on Supply Chains
I love to look at the Early Modern Period and the Modern Age through a capitalist lense. I see the significance of capitalism in almost every turn of historical events when I read the excellent book “Americana: A 400-year history of American Capitalism” by Bhu Srinivasan. After I read the chapter on the American Civil…
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How the consulting world screwed up the ‘Lean’ Idea
The lean idea was started by Toyota in the war-torn Japan in the 1950s, almost by necessity. It turns to be very effective and helped Toyota grow and even dominate the world auto market towards the end of the 20th century. It also fundamental influenced the industrial world. Now almost all the large corporations are…
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Platform or Specialization? Maybe it is both
I have been pondering with a “barbell effect” in the ongoing economy. Take Amazon as an example. It is obviously dominating the e-commerce world, and it is continuously growing. But is it a winner-take-all situation? Actually no. We see a plethora of e-commerce platform thriving all at the same time, such as Pinterest, Shopify, Temu……
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The US Economy is Changing in its structure
Photo: Business Formation in Numbers 2006-2023 Recently I have been reading some papers that claim that COVID-19 kick-started entrepreneurship, as more and more people changed their perspective on old jobs and started their own businesses. I do not agree with such an assertion. My thesis is that such a trend has been brewing for quite…
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Decarbonizing Last-mile Logistics: A quick summary
Recently I gave a short lecture over Zoom to a group of students at NYU on my thoughts of decarbonizing the last-mile in supply chains. The one-sentence summary? The decarbonizing magnitude is highly dependent on the configurations. If you have the patience, watch the 27-minute video below:
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How do sustainable supply chains improve the continuity of supply and protect the environment?
Photo: Woods in Sherborn, MA, Summer 2023. Recently I was asked by my School’s PR people to reflect on a few questions regarding the relationship between business practices and sustainability. They asked some excellent questions, which prompted me to write something down. Below is the first part. The question is: How do sustainable supply chains…
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Choosing the right fuel (II): Total cost
We have discussed the cost of using different types of fuel. Now let’s step back and talk about what are the total cost involved in marine shipping. For marine shipping, the following costs are relevant: Fuel cost, including initial purchase, energy conversion, distribution, operations and maintenance cost. Ship building/retrofit cost: How much does it cost…
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Steps to calculate the carbon footprint of a supply chain
The steps of calculating the carbon footprint of a supply chain is straightforward: 1- You need to map out your supply chain. This also defines the boundary of your calculation. 2- Collect activity data at each level of your supply chain. For example, an oil company may start at the exploration and drilling stage, and…
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How large is the supply chain economy? The answer may surprise you
Recently I have been working on a book about the “supplychainification” of economies around the world – If you have never heard about the word “supplychainification”, no worry. I have not either. My collaborators and I invented it, and I will explain it in a separate article. In here, I answer a even simpler (but…
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So Ford Wants to Do Away with its Dealers…
According to the Detroit Free Press, Jim Farley, the current Ford CEO, said that he wants to sell its EVs online rather than through its dealerships. Apparently, he was upset at the markups added by many of its dealers on its ever-so-popular electric F-150 Lightning that offended many customers. For example, one of the dealers…
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EV in 2022 and Beyond: More Good News, but Uncertainties Too
Recently I was asked to reflect a little on the recent EV movement, so I dug a bit on the latest statistics. 2022 is not over yet, so the latest number we have is from 2021. I was encouraged to find that while everyone was focusing on the COVID in 2021, EV sales actually nearly…
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If Facebook (Meta) disappeared 3 years from today (in 2025), I will not be surprised
Warren Buffet famously said that “Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.” So, do not treat this as a forecast. Just treat me as a bad forecaster. But really, I am trying to apply a theory about clockspeed into this specific case. Many years ago…
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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 technical details as well as personal anecdotes. A wonderful read. I flipped to the chapter on Intel once I got my hands on the book, because it was the…
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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 packaging that I was impressed with. You see, in order to create proper cushion for the items shipped in a…
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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 there were too high, saying that “We’ve determined the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated and continuing to scale Zillow Offers would…
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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 a modern digitized society. If we accept that our society is heading to a digital one where almost all things will depend on information technology,…
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What is the Supply Chains of the Future?
At the risk of sounding overly ambitious and pompous, I propose to think about a big topic: What should the supply chain of the future look like? This is such a big topic and I thought I would start by throwing a few adjectives to get the conversation going: Digital Automated Agile/Adaptive/Aligned Sustainable Among all…
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A Tale of Two Chains: Supply Chain and Blockchain
I cannot believe that I have not written a post on blockchain, until now. The matter of fact is that I have been teaching blockchain for a number of years, and I do think blockchain holds great promises in the digital future of supply chain management. But first let’s back up for a second. Why…
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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 actually storage space. The article reported: “In a full 3 hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than…