Globalisation & global supply chains - new challenges vs new solutions

Hello again everybody. It makes fun, to see You all back here in my blog again. Lots of very motivating and interesting comments and questions have been coming from all over the world to my posts and I would like to share one of these with You first. Many of You have expressed their admiration for the easily detectable open culture and strong team spirit, which we have managed to establish within our company and one of You asked me, to comment more specifically, how I personally see the importance of diversity for modern teams and leadership and how we at Vulkan do Brasil deal with it in practice. I will answer this very nice and important question on ocasion of one of my future posts, because I have already chosen to give You some insights today on how I see and deal with the important topics globalisation and global supply chains. 

We are right now in a time and under circumstances, where it seems to be fashion to declare the end of the globalisation, as we got to know it during the last decades. Well, to a certain extend it is a fact, that governments and politicians in many countries are retreating from their former more globally oriented politics and intentions and are much more focussing on their home affairs and themselfes. As far as this has to do with the need to fix home made problems and focus the efforts, resources and dedication on this, I would not necessarily call it wrong. At least we can understand it. But if it comes to the aggressive denial of global cooperation, bridge building and refusal of contribution to solving global problems like the protection of the environment, the combat of deseases, wars and hunger, things clearly change for me and turn unwanted and counter productive from a general humanity standpoint. 

But unfortunately, this is what more and more is happening now and we must altogether cross our fingers, that it does not continue forever. Finally all humans live in the same one world and must arrange each other with all others including the sharing of this planet`s wealth, resources and space. As an engineer and with some experience in modern technologies, I can easily imagine, that mankind during the next decades will find the right technical and economical solutions for all challenges, which we altogether face right now. This refers to all kinds of modern technologies, which will enable us to generate clean energies, solve the dramatic global water supply and waste management questions, increase the production and distribution of healthy food for the growing world population, find smart solutions for the future traffic of the people in the mega cities, develop sustainable processes for the efficient and environment friendly utilisation of mineral resources and many other technological challenges more.

As far as these questions depend on technical solutions, I am totally relaxed and convinced, that mankind will find and develop these. But the really big challenge for us is, how to find peace, mutual acceptation and a certain happiness or at least equilibrium between all humans, peoples, religions, cultures and countries on all continents of this wonderful planet? I don`t believe, that mankind will eradicate itself. I have never believed in the theories and fears of the apologists, which You can find every now and then with their conspirative theories of "the end of the world". But I have my doubts with respect to our conditions, to reach such a paradise like state of equilibrium between all humans everywhere on this globe. Our experience since the foundation of the first tribes and cultures has shown us so far, that humans really seem to be "the worst animals" on earth and always create trouble amongst themselfes and with the others. This is something where I cannot imagine, that modern technologies finally can help. This goes deep into our brains and souls and DNAs. Maybe some of You have gained experience with these questions and would like to comment on it. 

Now - with the actually given situation, business and industry in general and in all countries are finding themselfes confronted with new, not really expected and/or anticipated challenges. Many companies attend the global markets with their products beeing manufactured in certain countries but need to distribute them from there to all other market regions. This has become quite complicated for many companies due to the actual limitations with respect to the availability of raw materials, workers, transportation and distribution means and also - not only in the case of B2C business - with the sale of their products. Some companies find themselfes in terrible situations, where their factories are missing urgently needed raw materials or components. Others anyhow can`t continue to manufacture, because the sale of their products due to lock downs and because of reduced customer demand has stopped and their warehouses are full with non-moving goods.

In our particular case, all this is thank God not an issue. For the manufacture of our couplings, brakes and backstops for all types of industrial applications, like in mining, iron & steel, sugar & alcohol, pulp & paper, oil & gas, bulk solids handling, transportation and ship loading, for all kinds of cranes, hoists and material elevators, pumps, compressors, ventilators, turbines, mills, seperators, mixers, cooling towers etc. we almost exclusively use raw materials and components, which we buy on the local brazilian market and we have not found any dificulties so far with our supply chain for these. Only a few materials, actually mainly special components, are beeing bought from suppliers in the US, Europe and Asia. But we normally have a certain minimum "safety" stock of these in our warehouse at our factory in Itatiba and even with these imported materials we have not really found bigger problems so far. For sure this makes an important part of our high attractivity for our customers, because they know they can blindly rely on us and we will never let them down. This is extremely important for our main customers, because they cannot loose running time for their operations and must under all circumstances keep their processes and operations going. 

One more reason for our relative independence of global supplies is, that because of our huge portfolio of all kinds of couplings, brakes and backstops, we can in many cases offer our customers many times alternative solutions. This is often important, because this gives them opportunities to speed up deliveries and solutions of emergency situations in their installations. We are not a company, which sells only products from the catalogue and from the shelf in a warehouse. Our speciality is, to develop or modify products exactly as they are needed by our customers and according to their specifications. We love to provide customized products and solutions but we do not just develop and supply these. We accompany the instalation, comissioning and start-up of these together with our costumers wherever their facilities are. Our specilized and highly versatile service engineers and technicians travel around the globe whenever and whereever necessary - for sure now with the unfortunately given temporary travel and entry limitations for certain countries. 

Coming back to what I have mentioned before. My own strong conviction is, that politicians, politics, fashions and philosophies will continue to change ongoingly and that it is just a question of time, until the right now interrupted globalisation processes will be re-taken by humanity. No way out - single countries and societies cannot resist for much long to the pressure, to take actively part in the joint solution finding for the really big problems, which exist for all humans and may not be postponed for long. Time is running! 

But - and this is also very sure - we altogether have learned a lot during the Covid-19 crisis, which by the way is all bot not over yet, and I am absolutely convinced, that the whole world incl. politics, economy, industry and business will not return to where Covid-19 has interrupted us a few months ago, but will adapt ourselfes to many new ways how to live, do business,  manufacture and distribute products. 

And I can also not see any contradiction between globalized economy and business and regionally distributed manufacturing and supply chain structures. For us as technology suppliers this does not make the least difference. We follow anyhow our customers and their requirements and needs globally. In the end what finally decides about the success of our business is only their decision, to buy products from us, and not our intention to sell our products to them. 

I am very sure, that several of my readers will jump on these thoughts and tell us their own experiences and ideas about these so highly important topics. This makes me pretty curious and I will definitely share all comments coming in upon these topics with You for further discussion in future posts.

This is the end - not of my blog, but of my today`s post. We all need to start to work now and focus on our to do`s for today and for the freshly started new week. Have fun! Wish You success! See You again here tomorrow.