Toshi's Profile

Very interesting post! When reading the post, I got the impression that the bottleneck of Boeing’s digitization could be legislative, because the company needs to obtain the Federal Aviation Administration approval. Even if Boeing had a right strategy for achieving digitize its whole supply chain, it would not be able to sell planes without government approval. Another risk associated with digitization in general is security. If all the information of Boeing’s supply chain is shared through internet, the risk of hacking may increase. Although it may create some problems at the beginning, I am optimistic about the long term improvements!

Great post on the impact of Brexit! Reading this post, I wondered what it means to JLR to be a British company while building both factories and R&D facilities outside of the UK. Again, I am not sure what the UK has protected through Brexit as companies exit from the UK. One thing JLR could benefit from Brexit is, if the company could offset the increased cost of importing, the sales in the UK. I do think that JLR should think about ways in which it can maximize the benefit of potentially increasing its price competitiveness in its local market. I personally do not think this benefit overweights the loss of Brexit, but it is the reality that the company needs to face.

Very interesting! I personally thought newspaper companies will lose their role as most of news become available online for free. Although thinking in retrospect, they did not have a choice to stay with the paper subscription model, the decision must have been very challenging, because the digital model eliminates the whole supply chain they build in the past. It is a LEAD case.

I am also curious to see what NYT will do to the questions you raised at the end. If NYT continues to create its content with the feedback loop, what is the role of NYT in the future? How would NYT continue to add value in the new supply chain of media?

Interesting post! Although it is a problem in the IT industry, it is essentially a people’s problem. The companies in Silicon Valley say that they are short of engineers, but as much as 56,000 employees were laid off in 2017. I suppose not all of them are engineers, of course, but clearly the human capital is not fully utilized in a global scale. Infosys has been the solution for engineering scarcity, but if the company failed to train its employees, it could become the bottleneck of new technologies. I guess the world needs to find the human resource else where. Would that be in another emerging county, would AI be able to take some repetitive jobs, or would Infosys be able to reinvent itself?

Great post! I did on a similar topic, but more on shipping. I really enjoyed that you focused on the aspect of an extended enterprise. I do agree that collaboration with external parties is the key for UPS’s success in digitization of its supply chain. As you pointed out, however, I am not sure if their external partners all do have capital to fund this movement. I also think that standardization is required to achieve the collaboration among parties. Although Bitcoin is the most application of blockchain technology, I do not think it is suitable for this case. The question is who will set the standard for supply chain. Will it be Amazon again??