It’s easy to think that modern supply chains are as efficient as they’ve ever been considering how the resources of so many countries and companies can be leveraged through instant telecommunications to find every possible solution to any given problem.

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Global supply chains are certainly more complex than they’ve ever been. Complexity is not an absolute good, though. It comes with tradeoffs. In many ways, it’s true that today’s supply chains are very efficient, depending on the definition of efficient used. If a manufacturer has several vendors of a specific component, it has some flexibility if their preferred vendor suddenly can’t provide that component. But sometimes supply chains can become so large and complex that manufacturers can’t fully track the origins of source materials. If all the vendors of that same component are sourcing raw materials from the same supplier and that supplier shuts down for any reason, then […]

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