Supply Chain by the Numbers
   
 

-August 19 , 2010
   
 

This Week’s Supply Chain by the Numbers for August 19, 2010

   
 

Supplier Risk Plans Made but not Used; Another Duty Salvo in Mexican Trucker War; Long Wait for RFID Inlays; A Million Chinese Foxconn Workers get Mass Therapy

   
 
 
 

50%

The number of companies which actually execute according to formal plans in case of a supply chain disruption when an actual disruption occurs, according to a recent survey by Boston Consulting Group, even though 90% of respondents said they had such formal plans in place.

 
 



 

26

Number of new product categories added this week to the list of those that would see duties on them if imported into Mexico, as the government there added a second round of tariffs (the first set came in 2009) over the refusal of the US to comply with requirements in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to open the US market to Mexican trucking companies (and drivers). The newly dutied product classes include pork, oranges, and chewing gum, among others.

 
 
 
920,000

The amazing number of workers who will be invited to rallies to boost morale at China’s Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer. The rallies came after a series of well-publicized suicides at the maker of Apple’s iPhones and many other branded goods, and will occur in phases across Foxconn’s 16 manufacturing campuses in China, at which total employment is expected to rise to 1.3 million in 2011. The first rally for tens of thousands of workers was held this week.

 
 
 
 
6

Number of months of lead times for large orders for EPC Gen 2 RFID “inlays,” according to a variety of industry sources, as growing overall demand and need for hundreds of millions of additional tags to support the new WalMart item-level apparel tagging program is causing an RFID supply crunch (see Is WalMart Item-Level Tagging Program Leading to an EPC Inlay Capacity Crunch?).
 
 
 
 
 
 
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