Supply Chain by the Numbers
   
 

- Feb. 20, 2014
   
  Supply Chain by the Numbers for Week of Feb. 20, 2014
   
 

Amazon India to Take Control of Deliveries; Parker Hannifin Driving Down Inventories with S&OP; VW Workers in US Tell UAW to "Bug" Off; Apple Supplier Auditors Even Busier in 2013
   
 
 
 

100%

The amount of its ecommerce deliveries in the rapidly growing India market that Amazon.com says will be handled by its own logistics network - meaning its own trucks - over the next two years. So says Amit Agarwal, who heads up of Amazon India, during a meeting in January with about half a dozen of the company's top engineers, according to reports that just surfaced this week. "We don't want to repeat the mistakes we made in China," Agarwal said, according to the country's The Economic Times. A prelude to what we may see in the US someday? Maybe.
 
 



 
 
 

10-15%

Amount by which motion control systems giant Parker Hannifin believe it can reduce total company inventory levels from rolling out a high performance Sales & Operations Planning process across the globe - even though it is already a very Lean organization. That according to a case study article in SCDigest this week. (See Parker Hannifin Up to Complex S&OP Challenge.) But getting there will be a bit of a challenge - Parker is a very decentralized company, with more than 140 independent business units. But under the leadership of the company’s Robert McAdoo, parking is converting SBU after SBU - after convincing division leaders how adopting S&OP will positively impact their own bottom lines, as well as benefit the company overall in the end.
 
 
 
 
 

712-626

Vote by shopfloor employees late last week at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, TN against joining the United Auto Workers union, dealing a big blow to the UAW's hopes to convert the many foreign auto factories operating in the US - all of which now remain non-union, most of them in the South. What made this vote unusual is that Volkswagen was not resisting the change and in some ways promoting it, under pressure from its union in Germany. Chattanooga will remain the only one of VW's 60+ plants worldwide that isn't unionized. The German union, IG Metall, still holds out hope for creation of a Euro-style "works council" at the plant, though it appear illegal in the US.
 
 
 
 
 

451

Number of site audits Apple performed in 2013 across its extended supply chain, meaning not just at tier 1 suppliers such as contract manufacturing giant Foxconn, but also at tier 2 and even tier 3 suppliers. That is up 51% from the 298 audits performed in 2012, which was in turn up substantially from 2011. The sites are evaluated in a number of categories (environment, working conditions, health, etc.), as prescribed in Apple's 100+ page Supplier Code of Conduct. In addition to setting the pace for self-evaluation of its supply chain's behavior, the process also implies Apple has a pretty good handle on all the complex relationships its supply chain entails - a status many companies are trying to achieve, to reduce risk if not for other reasons such as sustainability.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.