Measuring risk and reward in the global marketplace

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the March-April 2018 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

March-April 2018

"Inflation creeps into U.S. Supply Chain.” So said the headline on a Wall Street Journal article I read this morning before writing this column. The Journal went on to write that U.S. companies are grappling with rising material and ingredient costs on top of pressure from higher wages—a potential double whammy— and noted that companies like Whirlpool and Ford have already issued warnings to the market.

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The Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times,” gains added meaning when supply chain managers consider the complexity of trade laws and government policies coming into play this year.
According to analysts at Panjiva—an online search engine with detailed information on global suppliers and manufacturers—2018 may not only be interesting, but also exciting.

An “alphabet soup” of multilateral trade deals are in progress as 2018, partly in response to a U.S. desire to pursue bilateral arrangements. Many of these overlap and conflict, and may therefore struggle to make progress, analysts note.

For example, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a proposed free trade agreement between the ten member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

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