Global Supply Chains In The Age Of Resilience
HP News, Monday, July 17,2023
One of my favorite parts of my job is meeting with HP's customers and partners. They often ask me how we're making our global supply chain more agile and more sustainable while continuing to deliver the highest quality products at the right price. It's a great question.
For decades, global supply chains have been built on lean, just-in-time principles. This model has been incredibly successful, but I agree with our customers and partners - emerging from the global disruptions brought on by the pandemic, we need to take a more comprehensive global approach. The need for supply chains to evolve has never been clearer.
As a global company, HP's supply chain must think in a much more holistic and interconnected way. I see the coordination required to run a large supply chain to be like conducting an orchestra, with many locations and capabilities coming together as one to serve the needs of our customers around the world.
The past few years have reinforced that we must also design our supply chain for resilience. This means having a multi-source strategy for key components, as well as manufacturing capacity in strategic locations around the globe so we're prepared for potential disruptions.
In practice, this means we'll continue investing in current sites where we have longtime operations, while sometimes shifting certain production to alternate locations to create flexibility and mitigate risk for our customers. In some instances, we will also build new operations to create capacity in growth regions where we are underdeveloped.