Consumer electronics supply chains

Andrea Cappello is a consultant in McKinsey s Milan office. He is a member of the European supply chain management practice and has worked in various fields with a particular focus on chemicals, consumer goods, and retail. Before joining McKinsey, he worked at SAP on supply chain management, manufacturing, and product development. He holds a degree in electronic engineering, with a specialization in automatic control, from the Politecnico di Milano. 

Because the synthesis of ATP and electron transport are coupled, if the ATP synthase complex is inhibited or if an adequate supply of ADP is not available, ATP synthesis will be inhibited, 02 will not be consumed, the carriers of the electron transport chain will accumulate in their reduced states, and the TCA cycle will slow down. 

Data collection or electronic traceability This method allows ensuring label integrity and transparency by means of software that tracks the product from the acquisition of raw material to the finished product. The supplier feeds into the system the product information that eventually is relayed to the final brand or retailer. The technology that is frequently used in support of this method is Icebreaker Baacode. Barcodes, or baacodes, collect information along every step of the supply chain and the end consumer is able to scan the code and, for example, find out where the farm that produced their wool is. 

This book shares insights from these stories. To write this book, we interviewed 75 supply chain leaders from a variety of industries. These pioneers charted the path. They worked in apparel, automotive, chemical, consumer products, and high-tech and electronics industries. To better understand the evolution of supply chain management, we asked them three questions ... 

For consumer electronics companies, there is a risk to future sales. The landfill issues could rise as much as 500 percent and will be a barrier to driving new sales. As a result, waste and disposal needs to be adopted as the fourth moment of truth in the supply chain. Companies need to take ownership of disposal and design systems for demanufacturing and remanufacturing into the value network. CSR initiatives are here to stay. 

As supply chains focus on the design of outside-in processes, and sensing demand and customer sentiment, processes will evolve to listen to the customer holistically and cross-functionally to better serve the channel. Today, this is aspirational but within two years, it will become a reality for early adopters. The fastest adoption will happen in high-tech and electronics, media and entertainment, and consumer durables. 

Electronic commerce and the Internet are fundamentally changing the nature of supply chains, and redefining how consumers learn about, select, purchase, and use products and services. The result has been the emergence of new business-to business supply chains that are consumer focused rather than product focused. As goods move from raw material processors through to manufecturers, distributors, and retailers, extensive coordination is required throughout the supply chain (Fenstermacher Zeng, 2000). 

The Internet has provided customers (both industrial and consumer) with a new way to interact with their supply chain. Electronic commerce has been widely hailed as a revolution that will permanently transform the landscape of customer/supplier relationships. Although the realities of the dot-com bust have tempered the rhetoric used to describe the changes brought forth by electronic commerce, the Internet will continue to serve an important role in business during the 21 century. During the nascent period of electronic commerce, independent e-tailers, funded by a heavy flow of money from venture capitalists, played a dominant role in the development of internet-based sales to end consumers. For many product categories, independent e-tailers continue... 

The B2B2C (Business to Business to Consumer) performance network is increasingly characterized by electronic orders. Even though the definition is not altogether accurate, it is referred to globally as a supply chain. 

Unilever pic, the consumer products giant with such brands as Dove soap, Close-Up toothpaste, Q-tips, and Helene Curtis hair products, introduced such a Level 3 system when it linked subsidiary companies with contract manufacturers. Unilever places orders electronically and the contractors use the Unilever extranet to update order status, make changes, expedite orders, and review shipments. Status reports are fed into Unilever s internal warehouse management and logistics systems in real time so Unilever can quickly coordinate the delivery of goods to retailers (Semilof, 2001, p. 1). This system replaces a legacy system that entered orders piecemeal via the phone, e-mail, and fax, and where all transactions had to be entered manually into the firm s supply chain management applications. 

Companies shipping directly to stores or companies and consumers, which have placed order electronically, introduce what amounts to a cyber channel of delivery. Here, e-fulfillment, or the delivery, tracking, and assurance of proper receipt, all done on a cyber-based system, is an element that differentiates the network from other groups. Supply chain... 

As suppliers take on more responsibility for technology innovation, they will need to become more agile and adept in managing the technology portfolio. This may create opportunities for the entry of more established suppliers from the consumer electronics to create modular systems. In some cases suppliers with high business volumes (because of multiple customers) can advance technology much more effectively than the OEM. The supply chain, as a whole, must determine what kind of partnership would be most effective. In what follows, we describe some of the elements of supplier management (shown in Fig. 4.1). 

Lee (2002) pointed out that along with demand uncertainty, it is important to consider uncertainty resulting from the capability of the supply chain. For example, when a new component is introdnced in the consumer electronics industry, the quality yields of the production process tend to be low and breakdowns are frequent. As a result, companies have difficulty delivering... 

Sodhi, M.S. (2005). Managing demand risk in tactical supply chain planning for a global consumer electronics company. Production and Operations Management, 14(1), 69-79. 

Many reactions start slowly at first and then speed up, as reagents are consumed and products are made. This is particularly true of chain reactions, in which products are made, and some reactive intermediate is regenerated to "keep the chain going." Polymerizations, explosions, and nuclear bombs are examples of chain reactions. These chain reactions have precise components that must be identified in a successful reaction mechanism (1) chain initiation, (2) chain propagation, (3) chain termination. The propagation step in chemical reactions usually involves the formation of very reactive free radicals (odd-electron species, while the chain termination steps may involve radical-radical reactions, which shut off the supply of reactive intermediates. We return to the gaseous hydrogen-bromine reaction discussed above ... 

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