What is the impact of globalization on the supply chain?
Just in time manufacturing isn’t the only way companies have used their supply chains to reduce cost. Manufacturing in developing countries is substantially cheaper than in the United States because of the low cost of labor. For example, the hourly wage for China’s manufacturing and production workers is less than one dollar per hour. But foreign manufacturing brings with it another set of challenges. It isn’t as easy to set up real-time data sharing with a factory in, say, China as it is with a factory you own in the United States. And the sheer distance that overseas goods need to travel—not to mention the number of vessels they need to travel on— to reach the U.S. increases the chance that they will get delayed. The bottom line is that foreign manufacturing brings back a lot of the uncertainty that supply chain systems were designed to eliminate. The good news is that technology capable of tracking shipments throughout the world is getting better. The bad news is that a lot of this
