Abstract
Supply chain management (SCM) deals with the procurement and assembly of goods, from raw material to the consumer. With the growing prevalence of offshore manufacturing and suppliers' reliance on just-in-time inventory management, SCM has become both astoundingly complex and critical to companies' competitiveness. This essay examines how data works in global supply chains, focusing on SAP SCM, the huge but hard-to-access SCM software with the greatest market share. It argues that SCM is characterized by two countervailing tendencies: the demand for perfect information about goods and movement, and the need to erect strategic barriers to the fullest knowledge about supply chains. Counterintuitively, this selective obscurantism is what makes supply chains so fast and efficient.
Highlights
Breakpoints and Black Boxes: Information in Global Supply Chains Miriam Posner In March 2020, as it was becoming clear that COVID-19 was going to seriously disrupt our lives, the necessities of American life—toilet paper, cleaning solution, paper towels—began disappearing from supermarket shelves, for days at a time
To most American consumers, the global supply chain looks like a firehose: goods just keep coming and coming, lots of them, all the time
To those professionals immersed in the day-to-day work of supply-chain management, the firehose looks more like an assemblage of garden hoses, each one springing new leaks as fast as previous ones can be patched
Summary
To most American consumers, the global supply chain looks like a firehose: goods just keep coming and coming, lots of them, all the time. Anthropologists and historians have conducted research at manufacturing plants and port cities, helping to shed light on the lives of the people whose labor keep the supply chain moving (Thomas; Chu; West; Ngai and Chan) These studies inform a body of theoretical work that seeks to understand the implications of globalization for capitalism, politics, and human understandings of the world. Seeing like a supply chain depends upon and reinscribes some of the key assumptions of colonialism, both about human difference and about the way value can be captured and transmitted Efficient as they are under normal conditions, a major global disaster like the COVID-19 pandemic can bring large parts of the system to a halt. When struck with an event of sufficient force, these fault lines have the ability—as we have seen—to compromise the entire structure
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