Are you implying we should have wasted billions manufacturing extra chips just in case there was a shortage and consumers didn't want to wait a year before buying a new car/truck?
Not wasted. Stocked by automakers, for their own use.
Car manufacturers have the nasty habit of keeping no stock —at all— even of inexpensive stuff like microchips, smd components, nuts, bolts... and ordering everything "just in time", while at the same time maintaining a steel-fisted strangle-hold on suppliers which are obliged to provide them what's needed when, or die.
Someone should probably have a stock, but it is not clear to me that it should be the automakers.
For those components that are used by multiple different automakers (and others) wouldn't it make more sense for the component manufacturers to be the ones stocking?
I'm personally ashamed that auto manufacturers are destroying the environment and making life difficult for all electronics manufacturers because they want to embed literally hundreds of micro-controllers into cars, just so that they can make it break when one single component fails.
This MCH speaker suggests 3 micro-controllers is all it takes to build a fully functional and road-safe electric car, and explains the current situation about auto manufacturing:
So, a couple of companies did actually stockpile chips (Toyota was one IIRC), because it was a component whose manufacturing flexability is pretty minimal. It was financially lucrative for them, since they could sell vehicles at a time where no other manufacturers could.
supply could just end permanently. some kind of plan would have bern reasonable in the old days but today?
in de 90's i had a business fail because the phone company never connected my land line (and kept lying about it) it would have failed a lot faster if there wasn't a pay phone in front of the building.
Shops could still fail back on cash a few years ago but now many have a card or a phone to pay and nothing else.
3-4 decades ago regular customers often got credit at their local store, bar or lunchroom.
I see people recognizing reality - JIT is efficient but fragile in the face of disruption.
Seems to me the sensible thing to do would be to recognize that for what it is and try to strike the right balance in an uncertain world. Even if your concerns are strictly commercial, a couple points margin in good times is unlikely to balance a year of massively screwed up supply chains.
Even the progenitors of JIT did not advocate for zero warehousing - they advocated for not warehousing components which could be manufactured on demand.
What makes you think the right balance hasn't already been struck? It seems rational to me that a pandemic followed by a chip shortage driven in part by crypto would be extremely unlikely, and if they had two years of extra stock on hand that would almost suggest to me they were too prepared (i.e. wasting money). Like if the zombie apocalypse strikes tomorrow, you probably will be unprepared, not because you're bad at planning but because this was too unlikely to have reasonably prepared for
> What makes you think the right balance hasn't already been struck?
Because it wasn't in the company I work for, and it wasn't at many of our suppliers, and it looks like similar things happened most everywhere else.
We've made a number of changes, both to how and where we source things, to how much of what we keep in stock, and changed processes to re-evaluate suppliers and overall state-of-the-market more frequently.
I know some of our vendors have as well, both because in some cases we asked them to, and also just from talking to them.
If your firm has achieved planning perfection, congrats. I mean that sincerely. But I don't think a lot of other places have.
My bet is the cost wold be on the hundreds of thousands (yep, globally). But if you really want to push the envelope, you can go with high single digit millions.
Hence the automotive/chips and other recent shortages...