Billions of parts are manufactured every year. Thousands of planes, millions of cars, millions of machines, countless products used in agriculture, defense, medical, oil & gas and more are made every year. As a result, everything we use every minute of every day is made from parts that were manufactured somewhere. Billions of them. According to some experts, the value of those parts is estimated at $15 Trillion, growing at 3.6% CAGR!

Supply chain stories keep coming up in the press. Let’s take a recent one as an example: A large manufacturer of aircraft reported $27B in losses quoting, “Fixing supply chain constraints is frustratingly slow.” By being close to the manufacturers in that supply chain, we can see that the root causes are multiple. Of course, outside forces such as the pandemic or geo-political events can create havoc. Those, unfortunately, are outside of our control. But once we dig a little further, we find hundreds of “lates” everywhere in the supply chain and most of these could be in our control. For example, another aircraft manufacturer could not deliver dozens of planes, all parked outside for everyone to see, because they were missing engines. Those engines were delayed by parts that were “lates” resulting from, for the most part, supply chain readiness issues.