University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Chain Reaction
Book

Chain Reaction

How Today's Best Companies Manage Their Supply Chains for Superior Performance

Robert A. Malone
Kaplan Publishing, 2007
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

Robert Malone uses his deep knowledge of modern worldwide logistics to help you understand what has happened to your supply chain. He analyzes the issues that businesses face and uses corporate examples to illustrate his points. He presents the material within each chapter as a series of short, two or three paragraph articles. This contributes to a somewhat impressionistic style, but getAbstract finds that the overall effect is quite interesting and informative. If you need to get a handle on the modern supply chain and the logistics it entails, this is a useful take on the subject.

Summary

The Logistics Revolution

Revolutions in manufacturing and computing enabled a subsequent revolution in logistics, transforming the world economy and the way people live. Automobile systems are vastly more complex than the mechanisms in cars a century ago. Yet, people drive about the same way and seem to take it for granted that their vehicles are more complicated, safer and more reliable. The car’s quality improvement has evolved due to increased complexity, not in spite of it. This story is the same in nearly every industry.

The typical little iPod holds “15,000 songs or 25,000 photos.” The Apple Computer Company worldwide buys hundreds of parts for iPods and ships them to low-labor-cost countries for assembly. Then it ships the iPods to multiple markets. To move such vast quantities of goods globally, businesses face a harsh demand for speed, accuracy and tight scheduling. Yet, the tighter the logistical requirements are, the more risk businesses sustain that various steps in manufacturing or shipping won’t work. Such compliance failures can have a cascading effect that is tough to fix. Thus, understanding and managing supply chain risk is a major business concern...

About the Author

__Robert A. Malone co-founded Variflex Corporation. Now editor for logistics at Forbes.com, he has written for logistics journals and consulted with many organizations about using technology to better deliver goods and services.

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