The Living Supply Chain

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the July-August 2018 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

July-August 2018

At Supply Chain Management Review, we’ve been writing about the talent crisis in our profession since at least 2012 when our MIT contributors were publishing a column on talent strategies. Last winter, the topic touched home when I picked up my local newspaper one Saturday morning. One of the lead stories was about two initiatives launched by C&S Wholesale Grocers with two local academic institutions: Keene State College and Franklin Pierce University.

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Contract manufacturing was the original business of Flextronics. That was during the boom years of the 1990s and the early Internet days.

The company largely manufactured PCs for big names like HP, Dell and others. Contract manufacturing was a volume business with razor thin margins, and relied on the ability to scale up a new product assembly line anywhere in the world. By 2015, Flextronics was no longer a contract manufacturer in the traditional sense, and changed its name to Flex.

“We are in full transition to become a company, that when I think about it, hasn’t ever existed before,” explained Tom Linton, chief supply chain officer.

During a tour of the company’s Milpitas, Calif. facility, he continued: “In each of the organizations I’ve worked in, I liked to experiment with organizational models—and this is the biggest experiment of them all. And I believe we are achieving an essential alignment of procurement and the supply chain organization that is unique. We are influencing and shaping Flex’s corporate strategy, but we are also totally supporting it.”

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