Informal Logistics Infrastructure

We describe the common traits of supply chains in EE - country-specific preferences, informal logistics infrastructure, labor intensive systems, and distribution systems. 

In Brazil, up to 15% of aU apparel is sold door-to-door in poorer neighborhoods. Monitoring of delivery trucks while on the move is far from perfect. Lack of planning, lack of reliable data, and lack of information visibility, cause delivery trucks to travel mostly empty on their return trips. The system also suffers from a lack of 3PL service providers and their expertise in organizing the fulfillment process. 

To succeed, multinational companies must work around infrastructural shortcomings. They need to develop strategies for EE that are different from those they use at home, and must find novel ways of implementing them. At the same time, such strategies need to be synergistic with one another, and they must leverage the company s current capabilities. 

---

Although the interdependency of supply risks is well-known in chemical production networks, it is difficult to quantify the effects arising from certain sources of uncertainties. This is caused by the complexity of production processes, the interconnectedness of the production network, and the limited capacities of commonly used logistical infrastructures. However, quantitative information is necessary to determine economically reasonable risk management decisions. 

GE expects 60% of its revenue growth to come from the emerging markets over the next 10 years. Clearly they cannot be ignored, but they also represent significant departures from established business practices. These include a weak logistics infrastructure with congested transportation network, informal transactional procedures that mostly depend on payments in cash, deliveries made in small quantities to a large number of retailers and intermediaries, and a lack of reliable data for coordination and performance appraisal (refer to Chap. 7). 

To address the logistical issues of potential analyses, transport infrastructures geographical information systems can be used (see Section 4.4.4). 

NS experienced many of the struggles associated with Supply Chain Management, but found that it lacked information integration. Many of the farmers NS worked with had never even seen, let alone used, a computer. Therefore, it became necessary for someone to visit the various farms to evaluate the anticipated levels of crop output. This required travel and transportation costs and became quite expensive. However, NS felt that it could not rely on local sources for evaluating the crop outputs. Next came the issue of product movement through the logistics process. The infrastructure was often inadequate, often requiring days, weeks, and months to get the product to the plant in Utah. 

Rapid response Erratic demand forecast, inferior infrastructure, logistics cunreliable data, informal systems... 

---