Will the Bangladeshi factory collapse change global apparel supply chains?

I’ve been thinking over the last several days about the tragic factory collapse in Bangladesh. One question that comes up is why global apparel firms would choose to source their products from Bangladesh. CNN has a spiffy graphic that clearly shows that cost is one reason (Bangladesh vs. the U.S.: How much does it cost to make a denim shirt?, May 3).

Of course, the US ain’t exactly the right benchmark here. The real alternative is China and  the Wall Street Journal reports that wages there are four times higher than those in Bangladesh (The Global Garment Trail: From Bangladesh to a Mall Near You, May 3). That kind of cost advantage together with a tariff advantage with the EU gets you growth like this.

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Big Data meets HR meets Call Center Management

We have already written in the past about the use of data analytics to best route customers to agents based on demographics and other characteristics.  The NY Times has an interesting article on the use of data analytics to improve retention and employee-employer relationships (“Big Data, Trying to Build Better Workers“)

The article discusses the broader appeal of these ideas, but focuses on applications to call centers. Why call centers? In contact centers, customer service agents, that are hourly workers handle a steady stream of calls under challenging conditions, yet their communication skills and learning capabilities play a crucial role in determining both the employee’s tenure and performance. The article discusses a new startup, Evolv, which helps firms find better-matched employees by using predictive analytics.

Transcom, a global operator of customer-service call centers, conducted a pilot project in the second half of 2012, using Evolv’s data analysis technology. To look for a trait like honesty, candidates might be asked how comfortable they are working on a personal computer and whether they know simple keyboard shortcuts for a cut-and-paste task. If they answer yes, the applicants will later be asked to perform that task.

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Those shelves won’t stock themselves

Another day, another Wal-Mart story. This one is from Businessweek and deals with troubles Wal-Mart is reportedly having getting goods on the shelves (Walmart Faces the Cost of Cost-Cutting: Empty Shelves, Mar 28).

Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) has been cutting staff since the recession—and pallets of merchandise are piling up in its stockrooms as shelves go unfilled. In the past five years the world’s largest retailer added 455 U.S. Walmart stores, a 13 percent increase, according to company filings in late January. In the same period its total U.S. workforce, which includes employees at its Sam’s Club warehouse stores, dropped by about 20,000, or 1.4 percent. …

At a Feb. 1 gathering of Walmart managers, U.S. Chief Executive Officer Bill Simon said Walmart was “getting worse” at stocking shelves, according to minutes of the meeting obtained by Bloomberg News. Simon said “self-inflicted wounds” were Walmart’s “biggest risk” and that an executive vice president had been appointed to fix the restocking problem, according to the minutes.

Note that this is not a supply chain issue. Rather it is a store operations problem. The goods are getting to the stores; they are just not getting out to the shelves.

At the Kenosha (Wis.) Walmart where Mary Pat Tifft has worked for nearly a quarter-century, merchandise ready for the sales floor remains on pallets and in steel bins lining the floor of the back room—an area so full that “no passable aisles” remain, she says. “There’s no manpower in the store to get the merchandise moving,” says Tifft, who oversees grocery deliveries and is a member of OUR Walmart, a union-backed group seeking to improve working conditions at the chain. “Customers come in, they can’t find what they’re looking for, and they’re leaving.”

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Would you deliver packages for Wal-Mart?

Right now, same day delivery is one of the hottest topics in e-commerce with multiple firms experimenting with different ways of fulfilling on-line orders tout suite. See this Wired graphic-fest for a summary of what different firms are trying.

Then there is this.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc is considering a radical plan to have store customers deliver packages to online buyers, a new twist on speedier delivery services that the company hopes will enable it to better compete with Amazon.com Inc. …

“I see a path to where this is crowd-sourced,” Joel Anderson, chief executive of Walmart.com in the United States, said in a recent interview with Reuters.

Wal-Mart has millions of customers visiting its stores each week. Some of these shoppers could tell the retailer where they live and sign up to drop off packages for online customers who live on their route back home, Anderson explained.

Wal-Mart would offer a discount on the customers’ shopping bill, effectively covering the cost of their gas in return for the delivery of packages, he added.

(Wal-Mart may get customers to deliver packages to online buyers, Reuters, Mar 28)

The article describes this as being at the “brain-storming stage” and I must admit that I don’t know where that lands on Woody Allen’s notion-concept-idea spectrum. Indeed, it strikes me as being something of an elaborate April Fools’ joke.

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How far does supplier responsibility extend?

How much responsibility does a downstream buyer have for how its suppliers behave? That has been a recurring question over the last several years as various news reports have highlighted tough working conditions in (largely) overseas factories. Apple’s relationship with Foxconn has been front and center here.

Now we have two stories that leave Wal-Mart facing similar questions. A horrible garment factory fire in Bangladesh killed over a hundred workers, some of whom were apparently making clothes for Wal-Mart. The problem, according to the Wall Street Journal,  is that they weren’t suppose to be (For Wal-Mart, Sears, Tough Questions in Bangladesh Fire, Nov 29).

Wal-Mart says it followed its play book when it yanked its business from a Bangladesh garment factory after the retailer’s inspectors found problems. But the chain’s clothing was still being produced there when the factory went up in flames last weekend, leaving at least 112 workers dead. …

The world’s largest retailer said it had revoked the factory’s authorization to make its products months before the fire, but declined to elaborate. It would not name the supplier it said was responsible for giving its business to Tazreen Fashions Ltd., a modern factory set up in 2007 near the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. …

Wal-Mart’s system of inspecting factories grades them on a color scheme ranging from green to red. It said most of the audits are done by outside firms, though Wal-Mart has an internal team that conducts surprise audits and checks factories with known problems. Factories with repeated bad grades can be banned from doing business with the company.

Wal-Mart said it is the responsibility of the suppliers to use factories approved by the company, and warns suppliers in an extensive manual that they can be banned from doing business with the retailer if they fail to do so.

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Is Sony dying? Some operations and strategy thoughts…

A great article titled “The Ghosts of Sony” and authored by Jake Adelstein and Nathalie-Kyoko Stucky, came to me via a tweet by my good colleague Robert Swinney.  (That’s one of the reasons I love Twitter!) It surely is worth a read as it prodded a few thoughts:

• History repeats itself: In our Operations Strategy class, we teach two cases that prominently feature Japanese companies both in the same scenario: they attack the incumbent (a Swiss and an American company, respectively) “from below” and gradually move up the food chain.  This follows the typical innovation dynamics that Clay Christensen has promulgated.  After Sony did the same, it became the incumbent and is now under attack by South Korean Samsung Electronic Co.
• Are management professionals good CEOs of tech companies?  We need to see more than a few data-points but Sculley didn’t perform well at Apple either, nor did this work at Sony:

Former Sony executives and current employees blame the fall of the firm on the loss of brainpower and good employees during the reign of Nobuyuki Idei, from 1999 to 2005. Idei was the first Sony CEO to rise up entirely from a management background and in the “Who-killed Sony?” genre of books and articles; he is regularly the prime suspect.

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The rise of the part-time workforce

So how is this for effective workforce scheduling (A Part-Time Life, as Hours Shrink and Shift, New York Times, Oct 28):

At the Jamba Juice shop at 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, along with the juice oranges and whirring blenders is another tool vital to the business: the Weather Channel.

The shop’s managers frequently look at the channel’s Web site and plug the temperature and rain forecast into the software they use to schedule employees.

“Weather has a big effect on our business,” said Nicole Rosser, Jamba’s New York district manager.

If the mercury is going to hit 95 the next day, for instance, the software will suggest scheduling more employees based on the historic increase in store traffic in hot weather. At the 53rd Street store, Ms. Rosser said, that can mean seven employees on the busy 11-to-2 shift, rather than the typical four or five.

Such powerful scheduling software, developed by companies like Dayforce and Kronos over the last decade, has been widely adopted by retail and restaurant chains. The Kronos program that Jamba bought in 2009 breaks down schedules into 15-minute increments. So if the lunchtime rush at a particular shop slows down at 1:45, the software may suggest cutting 15 minutes from the shift of an employee normally scheduled from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

This seems like every managers dream: Turn employees into on demand resources and pay for what is needed as opposed to what might be needed. The downside of this, of course, is that it shifts risk to employees who end up with both fewer hours per week and more unpredictable schedules.

“Over the past two decades, many major retailers went from a quotient of 70 to 80 percent full-time to at least 70 percent part-time across the industry,” said Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of the Strategic Resource Group, a retail consulting firm.

No one has collected detailed data on part-time workers at the nation’s major retailers. However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that the retail and wholesale sector, with a total of 18.6 million jobs, has cut a million full-time jobs since 2006, while adding more than 500,000 part-time jobs. …

The widening use of part-timers has been a bane to many workers, pushing many into poverty and forcing some onto food stamps and Medicaid. And with work schedules that change week to week, workers can find it hard to arrange child care, attend college or hold a second job, according to interviews with more than 40 part-time workers.

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A better way to build bikes at Harley

I usually let Van Mieghem take the motorcycle-themed stories but thought I should take a crack at this one. The one in question is a Wall Street Journal article about steps Harley-Davidson has taken to improve its operations and prepare itself for the future (Harley Goes Lean to Build Hogs, Sep 21). As the Journal tells it, Harley has greatly revamped its York, PA plant to both cut costs and preserve flexibility.

Until recently, the company’s sprawling factory here had a lack of automation that made it an industrial museum. Now, production that once was scattered among 41 buildings is consolidated into one brightly lighted facility where robots do more heavy lifting. The number of hourly workers, about 1,000, is half the level of three years ago and more than 100 of those workers are “casual” employees who come and go as needed.

This revamping has allowed Harley to quickly increase or cut production in response to shifting demand. …

Harley got more serious about cutting costs when Keith Wandell became chief executive in 2009 amid a severe slump in motorcycle sales. On his first visit to the York plant, Mr. Magee recalled, Mr. Wandell declared the layout and working methods unsustainable. Harley began scouting sites for new plant to replace York and settled on Shelbyville, Ky. The company notified the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, or IAM, which represents York workers, that the plant would close and move to Kentucky unless they approved a new contract giving Harley more control over costs. Union members voted overwhelmingly to make concessions, and Harley stayed in York.

Instead of 62 job classifications, the plant now has five, meaning workers have a wider variety of skills and can go where needed. A 136-page labor contract has been replaced by a 58-page document..

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The gratuitous iPhone 5 post: Charging to stand in Apple’s queue

In case you have been living under a rock, Apple is releasing a new iPhone and if you stop by an Apple store this Friday you can get one. That is, of course, if you get there early enough. For most releases of new Apple gadgets people line up early and often in order to have the newest device a week before their neighbor. But waiting is a hassle. Or, perhaps, a market opportunity (TaskRabbit: We’ll sell ya a spot in the iPhone 5 line, CNET, Sep 13):

San Francisco-based TaskRabbit has rolled out a new program that lets people in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as New York, purchase four hours worth of wait time in line at an Apple retail store for $55. That’s more than a quarter of the price of Apple’s entry-level iPhone 5, and $55 more than it costs to pre-order the phone from Apple’s Web site and carrier partners.

Surrogate waiting is by no means a new thing. What kind of neat here is that it is being intermediated on (potentially) a large-scale by a “distributed workforce” company.

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Logistics sweatshops

We have had a few posts about the reported poor working conditions in e-commerce fulfillment centers (see here and here). Now The Guardian has an article describing similar issues in distribution centers for bricks-and-mortar retailers (‘They shout at you and harass you’: how workers toil at Walmart’s US suppliers, Jul 25). Many of the complaints are similar to those heard about fulfillment centers: unrealistic quotas, poor pay and benefits, and a general disregard for worker safety. And, as with some of the earlier reports, these are being publicized by organizations tied to unions.

For my money, the most interesting part of the article is its characterization of the Wal-Mart’s supply chain in California’s Inland Empire.

While much recent attention has focused on abuses at the outsourced Chinese supply chains of companies like Apple, some experts believe Walmart’s US-based supply chain is built on a similar model, but one constructed within America US itself.

As is common in China, the supply chain is marked by layers upon layers of subcontracting. So, while every single box packed and unpacked at NFI Crossdock is destined for Walmart, the warehouse is owned, run and staffed by myriad other companies. The supply model has been dubbed “insourcing”, and experts say it is defined by ruthless cost-cutting as each layer of subcontracting seeks to eke out a profit margin.

“Walmart’s suppliers run out of places to squeeze out the costs, and they are left with the workers,” said Catherine Ruckelshaus, co-author of a recent report on the supply chain called Chain of Greed, that was produced by the National Employment Law Project.

Walmart is not the only big-box retailer supplied by the huge warehouses of the Inland Empire. Other major firms, such as K-Mart, Home Depot and Toyota, also work there. But Walmart sets the model for the others by its sheer size.

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