Boohoo, corona, amd supply chain ethics

To state the obvious, it’s bad when your brand gets associated with a phrase like “modern slavery.” That is just the situation that British retailer Boohoo finds itself in.

To backtrack a bit. Boohoo is an online fast fashion firm. We wrote about them a while ago. Their schtick is super fast product launches. They offer lots (as in over a thousand) of items each week and quickly replenish those that capture the public’s attention. As the Guardian reports, this served them well as Britain started to shut down because of the pandemic (Boohoo booms as Leicester garment factories are linked to lockdown, Jul 4).

It was a Friday, and usually the fast-fashion brand’s irrepressibly bouncy Twitter account would be pitching dresses and shoes to its followers ahead of a night out. But this was the first weekend of lockdown, and the company made a decisive pivot.

Instead of bandage tops and tapered trousers, it posted a “night in” thread, helping followers choose “that perfect movie for the weekend”. It advertised an everything-must-go flash sale, with 70% off all stock and 50% off 500 dresses.

And it started selling loungewear – that is, clothes for the sofa. A knitted lounge set, a cropped sweatshirt, and “Disney+ binge outfits” were all on show.

So a quick pivot from date night to night in. But how were they able to so quick adjust their offerings? By producing locally and relying on flexible suppliers mainly located in the city Leicester (How Boohoo came to rule the roost in Leicester’s underground textile trade, Financial Times, Jul 10).

Abandoned by big retailers three decades ago, Leicester’s industry splintered into 1,500 mini-factories, typically employing fewer than 10 people. …

Leicester’s flotilla of small workshops competed with rivals in Bangladesh and Turkey by offering an ultra-flexible service, handling small orders in quick time. It helps Boohoo test almost 3,000 lines of clothes every week and ramp up production of trends that catch on, be they brassy bodycon dresses or lockdown loungewear.

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The coronavirus and supply chain design (updated)

With the coronavirus lockdown my days have, shall we say, lacked structure. Hence, the impetus to write a fresh blog post, something I haven’t done in quite a while. Hopefully, Gad and Jan will be able to post as well. With so much of the news dominated by things tied to the virus and quarantine, I am not sure how much we will have to add but there are certainly some interesting topics that are fun to think about.

The first is what is or is not on supermarket shelves. There are have been reported shortages of everything from pasta to toilet paper. That naturally leads to question of how this can happen. One answer would be that customers are just stockpiling. But, at least according to data from the UK, it doesn’t seem to be a result of wide spread hoarding. The wonderful BBC podcast More or Less: Behind the Stats had an episode considering this question (Supermarket stockpiling, A-level results and Covid-19 gender disparity, March 31). This episode has a conversation with a representative of Kantar discussing what they found by looking at how people shopped ahead restrictions of movement. They have a panel of shoppers who scan everything they buy so Kantar sees where they bought what.

And what did Kantar find? Basically, there is very little of what they deem stockpiling. From a corresponding Kantar press release:

Analysing the shopping habits of over 100,000 UK consumers, Kantar found that just a minority of people are engaging in what might traditionally be thought of as stockpiling. For example, 6% of liquid soap buyers have taken home extraordinary quantities, and only 3% of dry pasta shoppers.

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Bourbon: A supply chain over a barrel

Bourbon, as you may know, is having a moment. As the graphic above shows, production and sales have soared in recent years. But the Wall Street Journal reports that supply chain problems may keep the industry from growing further (Bourbon Feels the Burn of a Barrel Shortage, May 11). The specific issue relates to barrels. Federal law requires that bourbon be aged for two years in new oak barrels (Why is there a federal law about bourbon? See here.) and it is getting hard to get enough bourbon barrels.

The shortage reflects a supply-chain conundrum. Upstream, barrel makers face a wave of demand because a half dozen established bourbon distilleries and 300 new, craft distilleries are increasing production amid a bourbon boom. Downstream, they face a shortage of white oak wood used in barrels because the lumber industry hasn’t rebounded from the housing market’s collapse. …

All the growth might have been intoxicating except for a sobering fact: The demand for more barrels coincided with a massive contraction in the lumber industry. As the housing market crashed in 2007, sawmills shut down and loggers abandoned the market. Lumber production shriveled to about 5.9 billion board feet in 2009 from 11.7 billion board feet in 2005, according to the Hardwood Market Report, which tracks the forestry industry.

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How are West Coast port problems affecting supply chains?

As you may have heard, West Coast ports are having some labor issues. The Pacific Maritime Association (which represents the shipping lines and terminal operators) and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have been going at it, affecting about 20,000 workers at 29 West Coast ports. (Can’t name 29 Wet Coast ports? See here.) The LA Times has a nice summary of what is in play. In a nutshell, management claims that the union is engaging in a slow down (effectively striking while getting paid, see here) while the union claims that they are responding to safety concerns (at LA and Long Beach) and that management is misrepresenting their position. In any event, what has resulted is lots of delays and a  slew of ships waiting off the coast for their chance to unload. (Never seen a slew of ships? Check out these images.)

OK, that’s all well and good, but how is this affecting supply chains? The sheer scale of the problem is rather mind-blowing. If it were just a question of losing one port, things wouldn’t be too bad. Ships bound for LA, could be sent to Oakland or Seattle. But it’s the entire West Coast. If the goods need to be offload to an US port, that means going all the way to the Gulf Coast or the East Coast. It’s not clear that is an easy solution. Part of why LA and Long Beach are such busy ports is that they have an entire infrastructure to support them. Even if a ship could get to, say, Charleston, it’s not clear that it would do a lot of good for some of the customers whose stuff is on the ship. If a company’s whole logistics system is based on breaking bulk in the Central Valley, having a bunch of containers in South Carolina is, at best, an inconvenience.

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Managing quality risk in the auto industry

Here is an interesting factoid for you: 24% of all the vehicles manufactured right now are built on just ten platforms. What’s more, by the end of the decade that number is expected to grow to 30%. The number comes from an Automotive News article that looks at some of the consequences of the trend (With the push for standard parts, quality is key, Aug 6).

First, why automakers are trying to move in this direction is clear. Being able to build multiple model off one basic platform saves a ton of money in product development as well as tooling and build manufacturing facilities. Further, they benefit from a bit of risk pooling; if one model is not selling particularly well, that may be offset by another that can be built at the same plant. Thus, even if a model slumps, all that expensive capacity is till being used. (See this post from last fall on how Ford is cutting its number of platforms from 15 to 9.) Globalization also plays a part in this. What kinds of vehicles sell well might vary across different continents, but if European, Asian and North American models can all be built on the same platforms, manufacturers with a global footprint can be ever more cost competitive.

But what about suppliers? With purchased components making up a significant chunk of the cost of a vehicle, car makers would like standardization there. In a perfect world, you would have the same break system on every model built on a platform, but that brings challenges.

“The requirement that we face is clearly to develop products from the outset in such a way that they can be used in all the platform derivatives without the expense of making changes,” said Sabine Woytowicz, regional quality director at Valeo in Germany.

But with mass standardization, a part with a quality problem can now be supplied to millions of vehicles. That puts a premium on quality. …

Martin Thier, director of corporate quality management at the Mahle Group, said: “When obtaining an order, we check its feasibility for both product development and manufacturing even more closely.”

It comes down to “knowing precisely what you do, what you can do and how good you are at it.”

For example, he said, there is now a more intense interest in investigating how an inconsequential error in one part would produce an effect in a different component.

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Managing supply chain risk and standardizing parts

So how many different radiator models does a global car company need? Clearly it needs enough to accommodate different sized engines and cars. A big pick up with an over-sized cylinder eight-engine is going to need something different from a subcompact with an under-sized four-cylinder engine. But does that translate to twenty-something radiator designs or ninety-something?

Bloomberg reports Toyota has been thinking about this question for radiators and other car parts (Toyota Airbag Cuts Create Opening for Overseas Suppliers, Jun 10).

In one of President Akio Toyoda’s biggest initiatives since taking over in 2009, the carmaker is winnowing the number of parts it uses and increasing common components across models. The plan will cut both the time and cost for creating new models by as much as 30 percent, according to estimates from Toyota. …

In the past, Toyota focused on developing custom parts. It needed 50 types of knee-level airbags because seats for various models had different profiles. By standardizing “hip heights,” as the automaker calls it, across models, Toyota says it can reduce knee airbag variants by 80 percent.

As of last year, the automaker had slashed radiators to 21 models from about 100, according to Shinichi Sasaki, Toyota’s global purchasing chief. And the company is reducing the number of cylinder sizes in its engines to six from more than 18 by 2016, the Nikkan Kogyo newspaper reported June 4. Toyota declined to comment on the report.

“From now on, Toyota will seek the compatibility of certain parts it uses with standard parts used by many automakers globally,” the company said in a statement outlining its Toyota New Global Architecture, or TNGA, in March.

Some of the anticipated benefits here are fairly obvious. For example, the article mentions that standardizing parts like radiators that customers don’t care much about (beyond knowing that the car has one) will free up engineering time to work on body or cockpit design that customers do care about. Similarly, many of the implementation challenges (such as standardizing hip height) are fairly clear. Customers may not care about knee-level airbags per se, but standardizing those means standardizing some aspect of the interior design. Customer may or may not notice.

The most interesting part of this to me is its implications for supply chain risk.

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Evolving supply chains

As the New York Times tells it, supply chains are changing (New Hubs Arise to Serve ‘Just in Case’ Distribution, Feb 12).

Major storms like Hurricane Sandy and other unexpected events have prompted some companies to modify the popular just-in-time style of doing business, in which only small amounts of inventory are kept on hand, to fashion what is known as just-in-case management. …

Just-in-case is a response to the vulnerability of just-in-time supply chains, said Rene Circ, CoStar’s director of industrial research. Since the 1990s, just-in-time has made sense for many companies looking to reduce the cost of keeping large inventories on hand. Technology enabled retailers and manufacturers to closely track and ship items to replace merchandise sold or components consumed in production.

This model also reduced transportation costs, because goods would be shipped only as necessary. By combining the just-in-case with just-in-time strategy, Mr. Circ said, companies are trying to strike a balance between “carrying the minimum inventory possible, yet never running out of things, because inventory equals cost.”

I’ve been trying to think what I should say about this article for several weeks. I have felt conflicted because, on the one hand, it hits on some interesting points. On the other hand, it also leads with one of my pet peeves of business reporting. Specifically, it links any change in inventory management to some failure of just-in-time management. However, I am not convinced that is actually a good description of what is going on here.

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How the New Year in China affects supply chain reliability

An interesting story from today’s Wall Street Journal (Companies Seek to Avoid China New Year Hangover, Feb 21). Basically, the Chinese New Year is complicating supply chain management.

For toymaker The Bridge Direct, Easter now begins in August.

That is when the Boca Raton, Fla., producer of Inkoos stuffed monsters and Justin Bieber dolls has to file orders with its Chinese suppliers to ensure delivery by the spring holiday. It used to place orders closer to the key selling period, which allowed it to get a sharper sense of demand and better manage its cash. But now the greater concern is making sure it doesn’t get left shorthanded because of China’s New Year holiday.

The company is one of many from the U.S. and other countries that are closely watching China as factory workers slowly return this week from the country’s long Lunar New Year holiday. Every year, millions of China’s 250 million migrant workers leave their factories and travel across the country to visit their families at home. The problem for toy and apparel makers in particular is that fewer and fewer workers are returning to the factories when the break is over.

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Disruption Risk Management Before and After Sandy

We already wrote about Sandy and its impact on operations immediately after the storm here. Several stories began to emerge on how firms managed to handle the storm.  Recently, the NY Times had an article on how Eileen Fisher managed the pre-storm preparation and the recovery (“Retailer Shakes Off the Storm“).

Recovery was both an urgent and a daunting task. A broad insurance policy helped a lot. So did some planning and a good amount of luck. As did an almost out-of-body detachment on executives’ parts to see past the emotion of sewage-soaked shirts and stained rolls of fabric to the prize of reopening a ravaged business.

When we talk about Disruption Risk Management, we discuss the three levels that need to be managed well: strategic, tactical and execution. The strategic level requires creating a resilient operations network (internal and external) and instituting effective risk-management process. The tactical level requires identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities in the current operations network, including threat identification and outlining an action plans. The execution level includes monitoring evolving risks and activating pre-planned contingencies. The article provides an excellent example of the interplay between the tactical level and the execution one.

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Sandy and Holiday Shopping

Sandy is going to affect holiday shopping… I know, you probably say that with many people without houses this is a very minor issues, but not if you livelihood depends on sales you are making during the holidays season.

When a hurricane hits, of course, there is the usual shutting down of shipping terminal and submerged warehouses. Due to the extreme nature of the storm, we saw deliveries being disrupted due to downed power lines, closed roads and scarce gasoline. All of these cause delays that affect every business, but the NY Times article “A Storm-Battered Supply Chain Threatens Holiday Shopping“ brings an interesting angle on the effect of these disruptions on small business, and especially due to the proximity to the holiday season.  The article tells the story of Robert Van Sickle

His pet supply company, Polka Dog Bakery, was relying on a shipment of cardboard tubes from China with a merry design, intended to hold popular holiday dog treats. The products represent about 15 percent of sales at the company. But the New York Container Terminal in Staten Island, where the tubes arrived shortly before the storm, was devastated, and Mr. Van Sickle’s freight forwarder has been unable to track down the containers. It is too late to reorder the tubes from China in time for the holidays, and Mr. Van Sickle has tens of thousands of baked dog treats piled up at his Boston headquarters.

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