
How did Tim Cook fix Apple's broken supply chain? - shry4ns
https://www.quora.com/How-precisely-did-Tim-Cook-fix-Apple%E2%80%99s-broken-supply-chain?share=1
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victor106
Efficient Supply Chain’s only get mentioned when talking about Amazon or
Walmart’s but it’s unbelievable how complex Apple’s supply chain is and how
much it contributed to Apple.

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sytelus
I understand that inventory is evil but how does supply chain really solve it?
I still have to keep X number of unit in inventory (aka "buffer") to deal with
fluctuating demand. A top answer says that Apple now keeps only 2 days worth
of inventory which is quite impressive. If suppliers somehow can do "on-
demand" same-day manufacturing then so can I (no?). I would in fact think
coordinating between various parts of supply chain will cause inherent delays
which will in turn increase the inventory you will need to keep. The large
complex supply chain is kind of anti-thesis of monolithic gigafactory concept
by Musk. One may argue that Musk isn't successful but I would say with enough
capital he should be able to scale up and might get same results as Apple.

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bromuro
As non american, I’d love to know more about this kind of business with China,
and how it relates to the US government political choices. Why the US looks so
scared by China, if it has such economic relatons eith it?

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SamUK96
> As non american, I’d love to know more about this kind of business with
> China, and how it relates to the US government political choices. Why the US
> looks so scared by China, if it has such economic relatons eith it?

It's not just the US. The entire west is afraid of China. In around the Reagan
years, the US - along with almost the entire west - offshored their
manufacturing to China et al. Of course, now it's been about 40 years since
and almost all of large scale manufacturing has moved to china (i.e. steel).

In the end the west wanted cheap imports, and they got it. But IMHO we are
beginning to wake up to the fact that nothing is for free (as always), and
what the west gained from having a virtually 1-billion-strong externalised
pseudo-slavary labour force, they will pay in their own demise as an entire
western generation grows up unable to build anything, begging to be
economically annhiliated. The west made china a god and asked for bountiful
reward - who wants to bet they will give it to the west forever?

