The Supply Chain. One missing part stops the line.
Front
The Supply Chain
One missing part stops the line
The chain of suppliers standing behind a single finished product.
Back
A car has tens of thousands of parts, made by suppliers who have suppliers of their own. The company assembling it often does not know who sits three tiers down. That is why a fire at one small factory, or a shortage of one cheap chip, can halt production lines on the other side of the world for months.
- Just-in-time delivery removes warehouses to save money. It also removes the buffer that used to absorb a shock, which is efficiency traded against slack.
- The fix is unglamorous: map your suppliers, find the ones with no substitute, and hold stock of the cheap parts that would stop everything.
Standard operations research
Keep exploring
Because you read The Supply Chain.
Six Materials
Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, lithium
The handful of raw materials that everything else is built from.
Making Medicine
Ten years, and most of them fail
The long filter that turns a molecule into an approved medicine.
Settlement
The payment ends long after the receipt
The back-office step where money actually changes hands.
Read as a path · 6 cards · 3 min
From Material to DoorstepHow a thing becomes a thing, and then becomes yours.