Posts Tagged ‘global trade’

Anyone who has worked across borders will tell you how difficult it can be to maintain supplier and customer relationships from one end of the supply chain to the other. The resources required to do so are often taken for granted, even in a growing economic environment. But in a recession, these resources become even more constrained as many businesses recoil and dig in for a tough stretch of lower revenues, tighter or non-existent margins, and over-worked staff. As consumers who overspent the past few years restructure their lives and finances, so are the businesses and organizations that benefited from that spending restructuring. Most businesess, depending on their individual situation, will have already reviewed, and made decisions about, how to focus and deploy their supply chain architecture over the next few months and even years based on the sudden changes in the global economy since the incredible downturn experienced just over one year ago. When reviewing supply chain architectures that stretch across borders, there are a variety of measures that businesses, large and small, will take to survive: exit a particular market, or number of markets, entirely re-allocate and re-focus resources from one part of a region to another maintain existing architecture, but at a reduced scale Full story