What’s next for just-in-time?

The Financial Times has an interesting set of articles on how the ongoing pandemic impacts supply chains (Trade Secrets: Supply Chain Disruption). These hit on things like toilet paper, firms pivoting to new markets or switching from a business-to-business focus to serving retail customers. The one I want to highlight deals with how any fragility exposed by the pandemic will impact supply chain strategy going forward (Be wary of scapegoating ‘just-in-time’ supply chains, May 27) that links to a post that Gady wrote a few weeks ago.

Here is the gist of the article:

A lot of intellectual momentum is building behind the idea that the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the foolishness of corporate executives in extending their supply chains without properly assessing the risks. Companies have been thinking of “just-in-time” when they need to be thinking about “just-in-case”. …

The reality is complex, and — a crucial point — differs with each industry. Some, like the car industry, have such sophisticated supply chains involving thousands of different components, some manufactured to extremely low tolerance, that diversifying into different suppliers is totally impractical through effort and cost. Sure, you will have a more resilient supply chain, but you’ll also go bust before the next pandemic arrives.

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Third-party food delivery and arbitrage

A short follow up on Gad’s post from earlier this week on Uber’s interest in Grubhub. There’s a blogpost on The Margins about pizza arbitrage via Doordash (Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage, May 17) that has gotten some attention this week. In a nutshell, the story concerns a pizza shop run by the author’s friend who discovered that (a) Doordash had posted the shop’s menu and started placing orders without telling the pizzeria and (b) Doordash had posted the wrong prices. Wrong as in Doordash was selling a $24 pie for $16. So if the pizzeria owner were to have an accomplice order ten underpriced pizzas through Doordash, he would quickly pocket an extra $80 relative to selling the same pizzas to a real customer. Since Doordash was doing this on their own, that would be $80 of Doordash’s finest venture capitalist supplied cash.

It’s a fun read and worth checking out if only to enjoy the line “Was this a bit shady? Maybe, but fuck Doordash. Note: I did confirm with my friend that he was okay with me writing this, and we both agreed, fuck Doordash.” But there is also an interesting analysis of whether Doordash and its ilk have a feasible business model.

How did we get to a place where billions of dollars are exchanged in millions of business transactions but there are no winners? My co-host Can and my restaurant friend both defaulted to the notion “delivery is a shitty margin business” when discussing this post. But I don’t think that’s sufficient here. Delivery can work. Just look at a Domino’s stock chart. But, delivery has been carefully built as part of a holistic business model and infrastructure. Maybe that’s the viable model.

After the start of this pandemic, my friend actually launched in-house delivery at one of his restaurants. He said he’s starting to get a sense of the economics and explained he’s starting to get a sense of the volume required per location to make the economics reasonably work. That’s what is so odd to me about third-party delivery platforms. The business of food delivery clearly is not intrinsically a loser. Domino’s figured it out. Every Chinese restaurant in New York City seemed to have it figured out long before any platform came along. My friend is figuring it out.

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Where is the [fill in the blank]?

The supply disruptions affecting some seemingly basic products have been fairly sustained. While it is now easier than it was at the start of the lockdown to fine, say, toilet paper and tissues. Other items continue to be hard to come by. Articles are regularly appearing offering one explanation or another for why [fill in the blank] still isn’t on the shelf.

Take, for example, disinfectant wipes. These are basically on every list of how to be safe during the pandemic. That led to a burst of buying in February and March and the likes of Clorox and Lysol are still trying to catch up. One consideration here is that in contrast to items like toilet paper wipes were not in every pantry before the crisis hit and they also aren’t that easy to make (Why Clorox Wipes Are Still So Hard to Find, Wall Street Journal, May 7).

Disinfectant wipes can’t be made as readily as hand sanitizer. The process combines fabric wipes with the cleaning solution, and the Environmental Protection Agency has in place criteria for cleaners to be considered effective for use against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

And unlike toilet paper, which is ubiquitous in homes and businesses, only about half of American households stocked disinfectant wipes before the pandemic, Clorox’s Mr. Jacobsen said. That led to an even more dramatic demand spike as current wipe users consumed a much higher volume while new buyers sought them out.

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How the air cargo market has adjusted to the pandemic

The ongoing pandemic has created a host of problems for a host of industries and supply chains. Logistics providers have had to scramble as demand for some goods has dried up while demand for other items has surged. On top of that, passenger airlines — which play a large role in international air freight — have been hard hit. How is all that playing out? Check out this video:

 

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Printing fabric for couches

Have you ever ordered a couch or arm-chair and waited an interminable amount of time for delivery? The usual reason why getting upholstered furniture often takes forever is the fabric. From the manufacturer’s point of view, the fabric is expensive, which would be tolerable if one could count on it moving through the process quickly. However, in the furniture world, you can’t count on that. Above a certain price point, nearly every manufacturer competes on offering lots of variety. Once you pick out a couch that’s the right size and sufficiently comfy, you get handed a book of fabric samples with literally hundreds of choices. Some — indeed, most — of those options are destined to be low runners, rarely chosen options that will appeal to only a very few customers. That creates problems for the manufacturer. Holding all of those options in inventory may just be too costly. A manufacturer may hold some of the more popular variants in inventory, but for the more esoteric choices, they will wait to order the fabric after getting an order for a couch.

But what if you could print the desired pattern for the couch on site?

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Production planning for the holidays at Lego

This should not surprise you at all: Christmas is a big deal for Lego. According to the Financial Times, half of the company’s sales come in the month or so before the holiday (Lego makes push to avoid disappointments of Christmas past, Dec 22). But how do they gear up for that big peak in sales? Check out the video below:

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Food delivery and robot pizzas

We all like simple solutions. Tired after work, your teenagers have friends over, and everyone’s getting hungry? Just order pizzas and the problem is solved. But how complicated is it to get pizzas to customers? Is there much room for innovation in this market?

The answer, apparently, is yes. The NPR blog The Salt had a feature on a Silicon Valley start up Zume that aims to use robot and specialized equipment to cut the time and cost to make and deliver pizzas (Our Robot Overlords Are Now Delivering Pizza, And Cooking It On The Go, Sep 29).  This video shows how Zume (which should not be confused with a failed media player) works.

Here is the key point from The Salt article:

Here’s how it works. A customer places an order on the app. Inside the Zume factory, a team of mostly robots assembles the 14-inch pies, each of which gets loaded par-baked — or partially baked — into its own oven.

Whether the truck has five pies or 56, it needs just one human worker — to drive, slice and deliver to your doorstep.

“She doesn’t have to think about when to turn the ovens on, whether to turn the ovens off,” Collins says. “She doesn’t have to think about what route to take or [whom] to go to first. All of that is driven off of our algorithm.” …

The driver then parks, cuts the pie with a special blade and delivers it piping hot.

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Digital manufacturing and legacy equipment

What should modern manufacturing look like?

There’s a lot of ways of thinking about that but I think that few would argue that information should be exchanged digitally. In a world in which products are designed and optimized in a computer, it is hard to see why diagrams and blueprints should  have to be printed out. Except as Marketplace reports, not everyone is necessarily ready for a digital world (Legacy equipment still hinders digital manufacturing, Jan 28).

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Who would build an Apple car?

Apple is apparently getting serious about cars. It came out this week that building an electric car is now a “committed project” at Apple (Apple Targets Electric-Car Shipping Date for 2019, Wall Street Journal, Sep 21). But that raises the question of who would actually build it for them. It’s not that Apple has never made stuff before, but recent years they have generally leaned on the likes of Hon Hai Precision Industry (aka Foxconn) to assemble phones and laptops and such on their behalf.

That got me thinking about a quote from Carlos Ghosn, who runs both Nissan and Renault, that appeared last week in Automotive News (Ghosn sees tough time ahead for industry disruptors, Sep 18).

Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn said aggressive hiring of auto industry executives by software companies shows how vital it is for new players to understand manufacturing and vehicle design. …

The complexity of cars means it will be tough for new players to enter the auto industry. ..

“That is one of the reasons you are seeing the outsiders massively hiring engineers from our industry. Why? Because they need to understand the product more in order to make the transformation they think they can make,” Ghosn said at a press conference here Wednesday.

Ghosn is not the only one thinking about what it would take for a tech giant like Apple or Google to get into the auto business (Apple and Google Create a Buzz at Frankfurt Motor Show, New York Times, Sep 17).

“What is important for us is that the brain of the car, the operating system, is not iOS or Android or someone else but it’s our brain,” Dieter Zetsche, the chief executive of Daimler, the maker of Mercedes vehicles, told reporters at the car show. IOS is Apple’s operating system for mobile devices.

“We do not plan to become the Foxconn of Apple,” Mr. Zetsche said, referring to the Taiwanese-owned company that manufactures iPhones in China.

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UPS and 3D printing

When you think about United Parcel Service (if you ever do), you like think about the big brown truck that brings boxes to your house. But UPS does much more than deliver e-commerce purchases to residential addresses. They also have a significant business handling supply chain logistics. That business is potentially threatened by the evolving technology of additive manufacturing. Who needs a logistic purveyor when parts and components can be reduced to a file, sent around the world, and then printed at its point of use?

That concern has led UPS to experiment with 3D printing, investing in a start up and setting up a facility at UPS’s hub in Louisville. They currently have 100 printers and are planing to to expand to 900 (UPS Tests a 3-D Printing Service, Wall Street Journal, Sep 18). Just what are they doing with these printers?

UPS expects more companies will migrate some production to 3-D printing from traditional manufacturing on an aggressive growth curve, according to Rimas Kapeskas, head of UPS’s strategic enterprise fund. And UPS is also talking with customers about taking on a bigger role as a light manufacturer using 3-D printers. …

Late last month, the operation received an order for 40 mounting brackets for paper towel dispensers from a division of Georgia-Pacific LLC that makes dispensers, Dixie cups and cutlery. CloudDDM printed the mounts and UPS shipped them to a Georgia-Pacific engineer by the next morning. The brackets were slated for a month-long “stress test,” said Michael Dunn, senior vice president of innovation development for Georgia-Pacific.

Whirlpool turned to the operation recently when its own 3-D printers were all occupied. The maker of Maytag and KitchenAid products uses the printing method for prototypes of items like trays for refrigerators and venting systems for dryers, as a way to test parts on smaller scale.

The article also reports that UPS has used the service itself to produce parts for its fleet of planes.

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