Where We Are Today.

[RANT]

Empty selves.

Gas prices through the roof.

Computer chip shortages.

The list is endless and the question is how did we get here?

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I think that the problem goes all the way back to the late seventies and early eighties. 

The Hardware and Sliver cities.

New Britain was wall to wall factories and Meriden was the home of dozens of silver smiths but now they are a faction of their former selves. Why?

I don’t think that it was any one thing but a combination of events, one I believe was stripping power from the stockholders of companies. At one time individuals stockholders could challenge the Board of Directors that was changed in the early eighties and also slashing the power of the unions. As a result companies were bottom-lined. Everything became about profits.

Before then it was company towns, companies felt a responsibility to the community, you could work your way up though the company if you wanted to. Then it became the search for cheep labor… down south the company went, then to Mexico, then to China.

Then the Japanese came out with just-in-time deliveries and the American companies embraced it but with an American twist. The American twist was a global supply chain.

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What did we lose with moving companies around like chess pieces on a board… tribal knowledge.

Where I worked for 28 years one of our suppliers of precision resistors moved their plant to Mexico in the eighties and then we started to run into problems with their products, they changed in value.

We had to suspend the product line until we found out why the values were changing. After lengthy discussions with the supplier we learned that they moved the product line to Mexico and that the new factor missed a step.

Fast forward to the year that we were bought out and the new company shifted our product line to one of their suppliers. I was called down there to fix their problem.

After a sleepless night in a motel next to the airport I was in a nine o’clock meeting with our new VP of engineering, their vendor, and me. I was sitting there with my eyes close listening to the debate between the Vps about the resistors drifting out of spec. I opened one eye and asked my counter point from their circuit board vendor… “Who was the manufacture of the resistor?”

Guess who the manufacturer of the resistor was? Yup, the same one we had the problem with.

That is the tribal knowledge that was lost. It took me a couple of seconds to recognize the problem which cost the company a month of downtime and millions of dollars to identify the problem we have solved years before.

The company that bought us out, shut down our factory, laid off the engineering staff and hired temps ended up two billion dollars in debt went bankrupt because of the decisions their executives made. The executives walked away counting their money, laughing all the way to the bank while the stockholders used their stock certificates to wallpaper their walls with them. I was lucky, the federally insured retirement accounts were protected and I didn’t lose my retirement plans.

Now we see the results of a global supply chain and just-in-time deliveries, the whole global network has collapsed.

[/RANT]