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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Live2Sail who wrote (177817)	1/19/2009 1:07:13 AM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Live2, I happen to be fairly intimately involved in the "productivity miracle" or however they choose to put it. I don't know how old you are, but a lot of people don't realize just how inefficient US industry was in the 80s and before. Technology enabled a ton of productivity improvements that I myself witnessed, for example US corps used to own warehouses of stocked goods, use a complex forecast and try to build to forecast while minimizing inventory, but its basically impossible to be optimally efficient. Some companies like Apple in the 80s were just getting into the just in time model that minimized inventory but it wasn't a silver bullet or anything. In the 90s companies like Dell used automation to eliminate warehouses completely. This "hub model" is now used in virtually every industry that builds to order. it eliminates all the warehouses and the staff required to run them. Then the internet enabled transaction level fulfillment through offshore manufacturing partners, another huge win for productivity. Prior to the 90s if you were apple building in china you could not see the production plan as it went through the line, it was a big black box. Now you can. Then there was a whole area of automation of the sales channel into the build schedule, that was the CRM area, where manufacturing planning could anticipate large sales deals as they traversed through that 5 level sales cycle thingie. Personally I can't see how companies like Boeing ever did without this, and they probably were doing it manually but that will only take you so far. Those are all things I witnessed personally, of course today its popular to bash Greenspan and others who believed it, I think it was real but like all of this stuff there was probably an overshoot at the end of the era with overinvestment. I sure wouldn't want to go back to 80s level manufacturing techniques in the USA though, we would have nothing.