Supply chains that link the UK and India incur waste up- and downstream – you sometimes wonder how anything ends up on a plate!
- Jag Srai
A typical supply chain can be a vast, sprawling network of producers, suppliers, ‘super middlemen’, retailers and consumers that connect, for instance, a piece of mined aluminium with a finished car, or a field of wheat with a loaf of bread on the table.
Dr Jag Srai and the team he heads in the Centre for International Manufacturing like nothing better than a complex, multi-faceted supply chain, because within the connections lies a vital source of competitive advantage. Companies that can more optimally ‘configure’ this complex network have the opportunity not only to improve their business but also to do so sustainably in an otherwise resource-hungry and wasteful world.
“Many supply chains today have developed over time, a consequence of often short-term tactical decisions or ill-considered mergers and acquisitions,” he explains. “There may be large distances between component supply and the end product, delays in sharing information along the chain, or an excessive fragmentation of activities.
“Within little more than a generation, the traditional model of a vertically integrated firm, which has most of its component and final product in-house, has become fragmented. Today, for manufacturing a typical consumer electronics product, dozens of firms in as many countries might be involved in its manufacture, with activities dispersed among narrowly focused companies distributed across developed and emerging economies.”
Srai’s team has been mapping these global networks across multiple sectors, developing novel tools for their visualisation and for identifying opportunities to reconfigure them to meet demand more effectively.
Read the full story
Image:Increasing the efficiency of food supply chains can decrease wastage
Credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT)
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
____________________________________________