Responsive manufacturing: creating competitive advantage through domestic and international sourcing practices

This study analyzed factors affecting production choices and resulting benefits and challenges associated with apparel production sourcing. The research focused on sourcing strategies’ effect on competitive advantage. Data were gathered through interviews with production sourcing professionals in Canadian and U.S. apparel firms that use offshore, domestic, or combined offshore/domestic production methods. Findings indicate offshore production may result in lost time and profit due to lack of control, wasted materials, rising production and shipping costs, and decreased quality and consumer-perceived brand value. Localized manufacturing may increase firms’ competitive advantage through improved control of production processes; enhanced customization, adaptation, and response to consumer desire; increased perceived brand value; and reduced waste level, number of failed products, and markdowns. Strategic sourcing and smaller-scale, localized production also supports the local economy, thus creating apparel firms that are strategic, responsible, and profitable.

Responsive manufacturing: creating competitive advantage through domestic and international sourcing practices

This study analyzed factors affecting production choices and resulting benefits and challenges associated with apparel production sourcing. The research focused on sourcing strategies’ effect on competitive advantage. Data were gathered through interviews with production sourcing professionals in Canadian and U.S. apparel firms that use offshore, domestic, or combined offshore/domestic production methods. Findings indicate offshore production may result in lost time and profit due to lack of control, wasted materials, rising production and shipping costs, and decreased quality and consumer-perceived brand value. Localized manufacturing may increase firms’ competitive advantage through improved control of production processes; enhanced customization, adaptation, and response to consumer desire; increased perceived brand value; and reduced waste level, number of failed products, and markdowns. Strategic sourcing and smaller-scale, localized production also supports the local economy, thus creating apparel firms that are strategic, responsible, and profitable.

Chinese whispers: COVID-19, global supply chains in essential goods, and public policy

If taken at their word, senior policymakers in the major economic powers have drawn adverse conclusions concerning the performance of cross-border supply chains during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. That such supply chains often implicate China, the origin of the pandemic, has also led to claims that trading partners have become too dependent on Chinese supplies. This in turn has led to policy interventions designed to reconfigure supply chains, which if adopted broadly could revise the terms upon which international business operates. A critical evaluation of this policymaker assessment is presented, based on near-time monitoring of medical and food trade disruption induced by government policy, on fine-grained trade data on the pre-pandemic international sourcing patterns of medical goods and medicines by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, on statements from U.S. government health experts before and during the pandemic on the frequency and sources of medicine shortages, and on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s latest evidence on the causes of medicine shortages in 2020. Such evidence vitiates the adverse conclusions mentioned above, but raises important questions about the factors that determine policy towards international business during a time of intensifying geopolitical rivalry.

Promoting Foreign Direct Investment in the Indo-Pacific Region: Scope and Opportunities

Indo-Pacific construct has picked up a motivating pace in recent years. Several countries across the world have shown their interest in joining the Indo-Pacific region. Indo-Pacific region has been the world’s leading source and destination of foreign investment. This article analyses the trends in investment, bilateral and multilateral investment engagements and investment barriers and presents a way to promote foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Indo-Pacific region. It also examines India’s investment relations with some of the Indo-Pacific countries. Further, it looks into the inter-linkages between FDI and global value chain, given that multinational firms play a significant role in bringing international sourcing, technology sharing, and production networking across countries.

Economic Retirement Age and Lifelong Learning: A Theoretical Model With Heterogeneous Labor, Biased Technical Change and International Sourcing

The employability of an aging population in a world of continuous and biased technical change is top of the political agenda. Due to endogenous human capital depreciation the effective retirement age is often below statutory retirement age resulting in permanent non-employability of older workers. We analyze this phenomenon in a putty-putty human capital vintage model and focus on education and the speed of human capital depreciation. Introducing a two-stage education system with initial schooling and lifelong learning, not even lifelong learning turns out to be capable of aligning economic and statutory retirement. However, well-designed education programs will keep more workers in highly productive activities at the end of their working life, and hence will substitute for simple social transfers, or for an early switch towards very low paid jobs.

Supply chain integration and coordination for international sourcing in the context of China’s processing trade

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how a foreign invested manufacturing company’s (FIMC) components sourcing process evolves in order to improve its supply chain outcomes in the context of China’s processing trade. Design/methodology/approach Grounded in the theory bases of the international sourcing process and supply chain integration, this study utilizes a single-case-study approach with a small- to medium-sized FIMC engaged in China’s processing trade. Findings This study identifies three stages of the components sourcing process: simple assembly stage, components localization stage and supply chain integration stage. In addition, the case study suggests that the type of processing trade evolves from processing with supplied materials to processing with imported materials as the sourcing process proceeds through the three stages and the internal and external environments change. Originality/value To our knowledge, this paper is the first to focus on an FIMC’s components sourcing process in the context of China’s processing trade. It contributes to a better understanding of how FIMCs progress through the components sourcing process and apply different types of processing trade in China to maximize their supply chain outcomes.