“Halloween Special Supply Chain Horror Stories”
To celebrate Halloween spirit this week and to bring light into our lives through humour, I won’t be giving you supply chain tips this time. In turn, I am going to enumerate, just for fun, three supply chain nightmares I have lived in my career.
Mind, these are all true.
1) The year was 1999; I worked as a Supply Chain Analyst at a car factory and had one of the worst shortages you can have -vehicle doors-, they are bulky, heavy and prompt to damages, so you can’t just put a bunch of them on a plane. I had to wait for the ocean shipment. The factory had already lost production due to this shortage, and I felt so ashamed everywhere I went because this was my supplier. The boat finally arrived carrying more than a hundred containers, two of which were full of my precious doors. During offloading, a crane failed and two containers fell overboard, guess which two? Yeap, my two containers full of doors. They were 6 hours under seawater, and the doors were damaged beyond repair. Oh well, place a new order and wait six more weeks. 💀
2) The year was 2002. Oil industry workers across Venezuela paralyzed all oil extraction, refinement, distribution, and administrative activities to protest against the Chavez administration. Soon, workers from other industries, university students and the population that opposed the government joined in. The distribution of gasoline stopped, and the country became paralyzed. Seaports were unmanned, so boats couldn’t call in and had to continue sailing away, not knowing what to do with the cargo intended for our ports. At that time, my job was to coordinate all imported supplies at an automotive factory. I was given a laptop and a telephone line to work from home and call suppliers worldwide, tell them to halt our orders, call the ocean liners, and ask them to deviate the incoming vessels to Curaçao and Aruba and drop our containers there. Six months later we got the highest “Demurrage and Detention” bill I have ever seen. It took about a year to clean up the mess in our inventory and ordering systems. Our company lost a fortune in damaged or lost materials. 👻
3) The year was 2004, by then I was living in the Philippines, and the entire factory had been working day and night for weeks to get a large number of vehicles ready to be exported to Thailand. Shipment dates were critical, and the boat’s allocated capacity, and departure schedules were unmovable. The week before shipment, when most cars were already in the external yards, prepared for departure to the port, a typhoon hit our city badly. Doesn’t sound like a supply chain nightmare because the vehicles were already finished? Think again; the strong winds brought debris of all sizes flying at high speed. We were able to relocate some cars indoors. Still, over two hundred were damaged with scratches, broken glass, shattered lights and mirrors and all kinds of other damages. Oh well, let’s just inspect them all, find spare parts in record time, repair them or build new ones on time for the same vessel schedule. 🎃
I will not torment you with more nightmares, but I got plenty more crazy-horror stories 🤓 like these. But I often also say, supply chain professionals, we are resilient, creative, perseverant, optimistic, resourceful and a tad crazy.
So bring it on 💪 world!
By: The Ana Lovera Inc and Sourcing Values Editorial Team. Copyright 2022.
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