I just feel extremely sad about the mass quantity of events like this happening right now because they are all aggregate to huge negative effects but the average person knows nothing of it. It feels so unfixable.
I really can't make clear enough how good Kagi is. I've tried all the competing emerging search engines as they've had their 5 minutes of fame. They don't compare to kagi. it's the first google rip and replace I've ever tried. Pony up the $10 a month and put your money where your mouth is on "let's pay for products instead of being sold to advertisers."
Just-in-time will cost you far more than it will save you. The problem is that when it fails, you judge those failures as "backwards looking one offs" as opposed to a cost that is part and parcel to being JIT.
Factory downtime is the single biggest cost a manufacturing shop can incur. No amount of working capital savings from carrying fewer screws, widgets, and bolts can offset the costs of taking 14 plants down due to penny wise, pound foolish math.
I've thought about this many times, and my answer is: when there is a massive, at-scale leak of seriously disruptive personal information. Think Google search history, medical files, or databases of credit card transactions. When it takes enough peoples' lives off the normal track, people will finally be fed up.
Yeah, it's not a super steep discount; I wound up getting $235 for it. Sales tax would've been about another $30 here so it was about $100 off sticker price with probably 10 hours of play.
Oof, this is a very antiquated idea of a CFO's involvement. I've worked for a few and more often than not, they're on the front line with every decision.
All planning really is based on assumptions, like safety stock levels. In organizations you typically have someone who decides "hey, this is the right level of inventory to keep, based on our demand right now." That's not a bad approach, but the problem is a lot of supply chain planning is top-down and dictates "we only want to keep $x tied up in inventory" and as you can imagine that number is driven by management as low as possible. When COVID happened last year, levels were slashed so low and now the supply chains can't recover.
Basically my view is that it's this over reactiveness and obsession with free cash flow has swung so far so as to create a too-painful jam.
I would agree that over consumption is a problem, albeit a separate one to the conversation at hand.
Thank you Toyota and practitioners of "lean" / "Six Sigma" that told us all about the wonders of just-in-time, to only carry exactly as much inventory was needed for demand. After all, we'd rather have that cash in a bank account than tied up in inventory.
While well intentioned, the problem is that it all relies on assumptions, largely tied to demand. And when demand goes through a wild whipsaw, and everyone takes diverging viewpoints of the shape of that whipsaw curve, the highly interdependent chain snaps.
Labor is an issue for sure. But make no mistake, the "restart from COVID" supply chain conundrum owes a lot of its pain to optimizing everything to the hilt, then reacting slowly as the world around us changed.
Could be Titanium Dioxide that is involved in whitening. Have seen enough from my view that this would be my guess. And what could be more basic than that. :)