Resilient Supply Chains: The Next Frontier
Bill McBeath - April 23, 2004

We're Getting Faster, Leaner, and More Spread Out

The past two decades have witnessed dramatic improvements to supply chain performance through lean manufacturing, just-in-time (JIT) inventory, ever-increasing velocity, extreme outsourcing, and related transformations. In the ten years from 1992 to 2002, the ratio of inventories to shipments in the US fell from 1.65 to 1.35 (see figure 1). These are enormous numbers in the context of our multi-trillion dollar economy...