Article; Supply Chains Are Us https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/supply-chains-are-us/
Supply chains are large industrial systems. They are composed of heterogeneous elements, such as ships, aircraft, trains, and trucks, but also systems of labor, information, and finance that build them and connect them together. Usually the goods flow in one direction and money flows in the opposite direction. Their physical substrates are themselves industrial products, relying on ships, trucks, cranes, fossil fuels, and electric power, tied together by skilled human operators, supervisors, managers, and other industrial roles.
Article; Supply Chain Sublime https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/in-need-of-repair/articles/supply-chain-sublime
While visiting Walmart’s corporate headquarters, Friedman also saw a modern supply-chain depot in action. Perched high up in a million-square-foot distribution center, he witnessed merchandise from thousands of suppliers flowing from the backs of trailers into a vast network of conveyor belts. “As the Wal-Mart [sic] river flows along,” he writes, “an electric eye reads the bar codes on each box on its way to the other side of the building. There, the river parts again into a hundred streams. Electric arms from each stream reach out and guide the boxes—ordered by particular Wal-Mart stores—off the main river and down its stream, where another conveyor belt sweeps them into a waiting Wal-Mart truck.” Notably absent from this account, of course, are humans.
PwC’s 2023 Digital Trends in Supply Chain Survey https://www.pwc.com/us/opssurvey
Between an increasingly digital world and persistent operational disruptions, the effective use of technologies in supply chains has become more critical. In addition to lowering costs, improving efficiency and building resilience, digital investments can mitigate risks and address environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. But as PwC’s 2023 Digital Trends in Supply Chain Survey reveals, many challenges remain, and companies can do more to elevate their supply chains in the digital age.
The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family.
This is how Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of Peace (1919) starts. After more than a 100 years this seems a good place to start in our own analysis of our current complacency about the inevitablity, reliability and security of global supply chains that structure our trade, economic, political and social environment today.