Everyday you use products. Everyday you consume products. Everyday you acquire more products in the blink of an eye never thinking about how they were made. The thought goes like this: milk came from a cow, some magic occurs, milk gets to the grocery store, you buy it, and cereal now tastes fifty times better.
That said "magic" in this case is more formally, or really known, as a supply chain: the cumulative network of people, entities, activities, information and resources involved in moving raw materials, components and finished products from original suppliers to end users. To simply put it, a supply chain is a sequence of processes involved in the movement and distribution of a product. Supply chain management includes suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers that distribute the product to the end customer. They include every business that comes in contact with a product.
I found it interesting when I found that some products have unexpectedly LONG supply chains. Who ever knew that the Wimbledon tennis balls are the products of the longest supply chain in the world. Mark Johnson, an operations management expert at Warwick Business School says:
"It is one of the longest journeys I have seen for a product… On the face of it, traveling more than 50,000 miles to make a tennis ball doe s seem fairly ludicrous, but it just shows the global nature of production these days, and in the end, this will be the most cost-effective way of making tennis balls."
Cost-Effective? While it may seem unbelievable that such a long distance to manufacture a product is cost-effective, all the materials for the balls are collected from the primary source of the materials, so there is a smaller cost for shipping them.
Every component of every ball comes from a huge variety of places.
According to Forbes magazine, in each ball:
-Clay is shipped from South Carolina in the USA
-Silica from Greece
-Magnesium carbonate from Japan
-Zinc oxide from Thailand
-Sulphur from South Korea
-Rubber from Malaysia
-Petroleum naphthalene from China
-Glue is from the Philippines
-Wool is from New Zealand that is shipped to Stroud in England
-Wool is processed into felt in England and then sent to the Philippines
-Tins manufactured and are shipped from Indonesia
These balls have a huge number of set requirements for how they should be when they arrive on site in England.
The balls MUST:
- Measure two-and-a-half inches (6.35 cm) in diameter.
-Bounce between 53-58 inches after being dropped onto concrete from the height of 100 inches.
-Weigh two ounces (56.7g).
-Be treated with a water repellent barrier called Hydroguard to protect from rain
-Be packed in a pressurized tin to keep it from going soft.
-Be kept at 68° Fahrenheit (in a fridge) court side to keep them in perfect condition.
Another long supply chain I figured was worth sharing was the process of Fiji Water production. The process of Fiji Water production involves shipping materials over two continents and four countries prior to being shipped into the U.S.
-The blank plastic bottles are manufactured in Allentown, Pennsylvania
-Shipped to Fijian island of Viti Levu with the water springs
-Labels are made in Wellington, New Zealand
-Bottle Tops are manufactured in Taichung City, Taiwan
-All comes together and distributed across the US from Plano, Texas
With all those transports, Fiji water bottles make it to their final destinations in a little less than 21,000 miles.
These examples are only two of which currently exist in world supply chains. Every product that exists has its own story and path it takes to get into our hands.
**May be a continued blog**
Thank you for reading!
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