IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

56 Chapter 3
failure. The average car contains ten thousand different parts, for example,
and bad logistics in regard to the production of those parts can mean expensive
products sitting idle for up to one hundred days in a field. Parts
manufacturers are working hard to reduce that idle time, but their task is
complicated: At Ford’s Toronto plant, which produces fifteen hundred
Windstar minivans a day, logistics company TPG orchestrates eight hundred
deliveries a day from three hundred different parts makers. Parts are
loaded onto trucks at the point of supply in prearranged sequences in order
to speed unloading at the assembly line. Loads arrive at twelve different
points along the assembly line without ever being more than ten minutes
late. It takes two hundred computer-wielding operations planners to orchestrate
the ballet. 20 The more the movement, the less the waste.
Many firms aspire to build ‘‘only to order’’ (OTO), rather than guess
what will be in demand and then supply it from accumulated stocks.
Obsolescence—products’ becoming unsellable before they reach the
market—can account for 40 percent of inventory carrying costs. Eighty percent
of toy sales, for example, occur in a period of just forty-five days, the
Christmas period, so a lot of work goes into improving the visibility of inventory
throughout the supply chain. 21 A popular metaphor is that of a retail
‘‘glass pipeline’’ that affords an enterprise total visibility of products:
the ability to identify, in real time, where inventory is and how much of it
exists. This kind of visibility is expensive: It takes major investments in systems
for enterprise resource planning, transportation and warehouse management,
tagging, tracking, tracing, and communications technologies to
improve visibility and, ideally, control and responsiveness.
The use of radio frequency (RF) tags and the Internet is significantly
improving supply chain management. Taken together, RF tags and software
agents are revolutionizing inventory control in manufacturing and distribution.
Transponders on product packages can communicate with devices
in factories or warehouses, enabling companies to know precisely where
things are in space at any given time. Organizations such as Daimler-
Chrysler and Southwest Airlines are using early versions of intelligent
agents to cut logistics costs still further.
Logistics is the incarnation of real and virtual worlds combined. In logistics,
information technology, data, and stuff are as one. Companies that
once ran fleets of trucks now run fleets of information systems, too. Companies
like FedEx, United Parcel Service (UPS), and Deutsche Post World