Supply ——Chaining 供应链
I had never en what a supply chain looked like in action until I visited Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. My Wal-Mart hosts took me over to the 1.2-million-square-foot distribution center, where we climbed up to a viewing perch and watched the show. On one side of the building, scores of white Wal-Mart trailer trucks were dropping off boxes, of merchandi from thousands of different suppliers. Boxes large and small were fed up a conveyor belt at each loading dock. The little conveyor belts fed into a bigger belt, like streams feeding into a powerful river. Twenty-four hours a day, ven days a week, the suppliers’ trucks feed the twelve miles of conveyor streams, and the conveyor streams feed into a huge Wal-Mart river of boxed products. But that is just half the show. As the Wal-Mart river flows along, 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, which will rush the particular products onto the shelves of a partic
ular Wal-Mart store some-where in the country. There, a consumer will lift one of the products off the shelf, and the cashier will scan it in, and the moment that happens, a signal will be generated. That signal will go out across the Wal-Mart network to the supplier of that product—whether that supplier’s factory is in coastal China or coastal Maine. That signal will pop up on the supplier’s computer screen and prompt him to make another of that item and ship it via the Wal-Mart supply chain, and the whole cycle will start anew. So no sooner does your arm lift a product off the local Wal-Mart’s shelf and onto the checkout counter than another mechanical arm starts making another one somewhere in the world. Call it “the Wal-Mart Symphony” in multiple movements—with no finale. It just plays over and over 高清山水画>小白点头虱卵图片24/7/365: 飘雪动漫社delivery, sorting, packing, distribution, buying, manufacturing, reordering, delivery, sorting, packing…爱莲说文言文翻译
Just one company, Hewlett-Packard, will ll four hundred thousand computers through the four thousand Wal-Mart stores worldwide in one day during the Christmas ason, which will require HP to adjust its supply chain, to make sure that all of its standards interface with Wal-Mart’s, so that the computers flow smoothly into the Wal-Mart river, i
nto the Wal-Mart streams, into the Wal-Mart stores.
超越无限
Wal-Mart’s ability to bring off this symphony on a global scale — moving 2.3 billion general merchandi cartons a year down its supply chain into its stores—has made it the most important example of the next great flattener I want to discuss, which I call supply-chaining. Supply-chaining is a method of collaborating horizontally—among suppliers, retailers, and customers—to create value. Supply-chaining is both enabled by the flattening of the world and a hugely important flattener itlf, becau the more the supply chains grow and proliferate, the more they force the adoption of common standards between companies (so that every link of every supply chain can interface with the next), the more they eliminate points of friction at borders, the more the efficiencies of one company get adopted by the others, and the more they encourage global collaboration.
回信的格式To appreciate how important supply-chaining has become as a source of competitive advantage" and profit in a flat world, think about this one fact: War-Mart today is the bigge
st retail company in the world, and it does not make a single thing. All it “makes" is a hyperefficient supply chain. As Yossi Sheffi, an expert on supply-chain management and a professor of engineering systems at MIT, likes to say,“Making stuff ——that's easy. Supply chain, now that is really hard." What he means is that with today's technology it is difficult to keep intellectual property cret and thus easy to rever-engineer any product and“make stuff”in a matter of days. However, building a process that“delivers stuff" across the globe——involving dozens of suppliers, distributors, port operators, customs brokers, forwarders, and carriers in a finely tuned chain operating in concert—— is not only difficult, it's very, very hard to duplicate.
道德名言
扫描照片供应链
在我参观了位于阿肯色州本顿维尔的沃尔玛总部之前，我从未见过供应链在运作中是什么样子的。沃尔玛的主人把我带到了 120 万平方英尺的配送中心，我们爬上观景台观看了这场运作。在大楼的一侧，数十辆白色的沃尔玛拖车正在运送来自数千家不同供应商的商品。大大小小的箱子在每个装卸台都通过传送带送入。这些小传送带会汇入一条更大的传
送带，就像溪流汇入一条强大的河流。每周 7 天、每天 24 小时，供应商的卡车为 12 英里长的输送带输送货物，输送带输送到一条巨大的沃尔玛盒装产品河。但这只是运作的一半。沃尔玛河顺流而下时，一只电眼会读取每个箱子上的条形码，这些箱子会流向大楼的另一边。在那里，河流再次分成一百条溪流。来自每条溪流的电动臂伸出并引导特定沃尔玛商店订购的盒子离开主要河流并顺流而下，另一条传送带将它们扫入等待的沃尔玛卡车，将这些特定产品运送到在该国某处某家沃尔玛商店的货架上。在那里，消费者将其中一种产品从货架上拿下来，收银员会扫描它，一旦发生，就会产生一个信号。该信号将通过沃尔玛网络传递给该产品的供应商——无论该供应商的工厂是在中国沿海还是缅因州沿海。该信号将在供应商的电脑屏幕上弹出，并提示他再制造一件该商品并通过沃尔玛供应链运送，整个循环将重新开始。因此，只要您的手臂将产品从当地沃尔玛的货架上提起并放到收银台上，另一只机械臂就会开始在世界某个地方制造另一个产品。在多个乐章中称其为“沃尔玛交响曲”——没有结尾。它只是一遍又一遍地播放 24/7/365(24小时、一周7天、甚至是365天)：交付、分拣、包装、配送、购买、制造、重新订购、交付、分拣、包装……
在圣诞节期间，只有一家公司惠普 (Hewlett-Packard) 将在一天内通过全球4,000的沃尔玛
商店销售400万台计算机，这将要求惠普调整其供应链，以确保其所有标准都与沃尔玛的标准对接，以至这些计算机能顺利地流入沃尔玛河，进入沃尔玛溪流，到达沃尔玛商店。
