supply chain

Polaris factory decisions controlled by Supply Chain Bottlenecks

By Bob Tita from https://www.wsj.com Supply Chain Bottlenecks Drive Factory Decisions at This Maker of Boats, Motorcycles, ATVs. Polaris is changing manufacturing processes on the fly to adapt to parts shortages; ATVs missing seats, snowmobiles without shocks. Polaris is juggling 30 or so supply-chain constraints for its ATVs, motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats and utility terrain vehicles. Like other manufacturers struggling with wobbly supply chains, sports-vehicle maker Polaris Inc. is deciding what to produce based on what parts it has on hand. Polaris is changing its manufacturing and sales strategies on the fly to cope with shortages of materials and parts and an unreliable global transportation system that has disrupted precise production planning. The company said it is juggling 30 or so supply-chain constraints for its all-terrain vehicles, motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats and off-road utility vehicles. Polaris changes its plans sometimes daily for what it produces. The company switches models for a while as supply-and-logistics managers scrounge for parts and materials for other models it is unable to build. When there aren’t enough seats in the supply pipeline to produce four-seat versions of utility terrain vehicles because of a shortage of foam padding, for example, Polaris shifts production to two-seat or three-seat models. When more seats become available, factories circle back to four-seat models or add the missing seats to vehicles that have already been assembled. “If you’re mixing and matching, eventually you’ll attain a good product mix,” said Kenneth Pucel, operations chief for the Medina, Minn.-based company. Companies spent decades conditioning their supply chains to deliver just enough components and materials to match production schedules to hold down costs for storing parts. The absence of backup stocks of parts left manufacturers more exposed if a few large suppliers couldn’t deliver on time. Tight markets typically provide opportunities for some companies to siphon […]

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Tesla among companies sued for complicity over child labor in Congo

by Matthew Lavietes from https://www.autonews.com NEW YORK — Five of the world’s largest tech companies, including electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc., have been accused of being complicit in the death of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo forced to mine cobalt, a metal used to make telephones and computers, in a landmark lawsuit. The legal complaint on behalf of 14 families from Congo was filed on Sunday by International Rights Advocates, a U.S.-based human rights non-profit, against Tesla, Apple Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Dell Technologies Inc.. The companies were part of a system of forced labor that the families claimed led to the death and serious injury of their children, it said. It marked the first time the tech industry jointly has faced legal action over the source of its cobalt. Images in the court documents, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, showed children with disfigured or missing limbs. Six of the 14 children in the case were killed in tunnel collapses, and the others suffered life-altering injuries, including paralysis, it said. “These companies — the richest companies in the world, these fancy gadget-making companies — have allowed children to be maimed and killed to get their cheap cobalt,” Terrence Collingsworth, an attorney representing the families, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Cobalt is essential in making rechargeable lithium batteries used in millions of products sold by the tech industry. More than half of the world’s cobalt is produced in Congo. Global demand for the metal is expected to increase at 7 percent to 13 percent annually over the next decade, according to a 2018 study by the European Commission. The lawsuit said the children, some as young as 6 years old, were forced by their families’ extreme poverty to leave school and work in

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