I thought this deserved its own thread.
So I've been in a pretty good position to see how everything in the catalog is affected by the shortages. Bearings, sprockets, chains, sensors. It all takes longer to get in than it used to, and half the time an order arrives with only half the parts. The rest has to wait until it gets in. We just got a bucket of grease delivered to us, and nobody knew what it was for. Turns out, the guy who ordered it quit a few months before it got here, and he probably ordered it back in November.
I'm not seeing a catastrophic breakdown in the supply chain... but I'm not in the position to see it coming. I'm in the wrong industry for that. But I hope some management types wake the fuck up and realize that ordering shit from overseas and hoping it'll be here the next day isn't a good way to run a business.
So. I work in a warehouse that's at the end of the supply chain. Any of the major parts suppliers has to drive at least an hour to deliver parts to us, and management doesn't like stockpiling spare parts since we lost a warehouse in a flood. We also don't have a parts girl. In some of the other places I've worked, we have a dedicated employee who runs into town when we need parts. If we need something, we order it ourselves and handle the billing.It's becoming widespread in all industries, for example, nearby factory had to cut down the production of their household appliances because suppliers can't supply enough digital indicators, now they are doing a crash program to make old school analogue one and discovered that despite still making them less than a decade ago, it's basically a lost art to them.
A big factor in current decline is not just over reliance on overseas suppliers, but also taking infrastructure and knowledge base among domestic supplier for granted and thus skimping on their maintenance, all in the name of big line going up in the quarterly reports to the shareholders. people with critical industrial skills have been ''disappearing'' for years and the process entered the tipping point during the kung-flu closedowns, same with infrastructure as people found out the hard way that you can keep a rundown facility running by jury-rigging stuff, but once it is closed for some time, it's terribly hard to get it running again. I read few months ago about a factory making specialist industrial lubricants, burning down (underfunded maintenance), it cowered approximately half the needs in North America, there is no one to take up the slack and it is unlikely to be rebuilt, due to too low profit margins.
So I've been in a pretty good position to see how everything in the catalog is affected by the shortages. Bearings, sprockets, chains, sensors. It all takes longer to get in than it used to, and half the time an order arrives with only half the parts. The rest has to wait until it gets in. We just got a bucket of grease delivered to us, and nobody knew what it was for. Turns out, the guy who ordered it quit a few months before it got here, and he probably ordered it back in November.
I'm not seeing a catastrophic breakdown in the supply chain... but I'm not in the position to see it coming. I'm in the wrong industry for that. But I hope some management types wake the fuck up and realize that ordering shit from overseas and hoping it'll be here the next day isn't a good way to run a business.