Market Supply Chain

1 A survey of logistics

When the chain breaks

Jun 15th 2006 | from the Economist

IT BEGAN on a stormy evening in New Mexico in March 2000 when a bolt of lightning hit a power line. The temporary loss of electricity knocked out the cooling fans in a furnace at a Philips semiconductor plant in Albuquerque. A fire started, but was put out by staff within minutes. By the time the fire brigade arrived, there was nothing for them to do but inspect the building and fill out a report. The damage seemed to be minor: eight trays of wafers containing the miniature circuitry to make several thousand chips for mobile phones had been destroyed. After a good clean-up, the company expected to resume production within a week.

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That is what the plant told its two biggest customers, Sweden's Ericsson and Finland's Nokia, who were vying for leadership in the booming mobile-handset market. Nokia's supply-chain managers had realized within two days that there was a problem when their computer systems showed some shipments were being held up. Delays of a few days are not uncommon in manufacturing and a limited number of back-up components are usually held to cope with such eventualities. But whereas Ericsson was content to let the delay take its course, Nokia immediately put the Philips plant on a watch list to be closely monitored in case things got worse.

They did. Semiconductor fabrication plants have to be kept spotlessly clean, but on the night of the fire, when staff were rushing around and firemen were tramping in and out, smoke and soot had contaminated a much larger area of the plant than had first been thought. Production could be halted for months. By the time the full extent of the disruption became clear, Nokia had already started locking up all the alternative sources for the chips.

That left Ericsson with a serious parts shortage. The company, having decided some time earlier to simplify its supply chain by single-sourcing some of its components,...