Geopolitical Concerns in a Global Production Environment Auto

As overseas producers play an ever-increasing role in manufacturing goods and parts to supply a global economy, experts harbor concerns about over-dependency on suppliers from less stable regions of the planet. Moreover, opening up trade with the world means each country and the companies within those countries will have to surrender a certain amount of control to an unknown entity.
Having to depend on entities outside a company’s direct sphere of influence can create stress in the best of times, but when tensions run high on the world stage, supply chains can become unstable. Since businesses thrive in environments where they can mitigate their risks to the highest degrees, any amount of instability threatens their bottom line and, in some cases, their very existence.
The situation only worsens for suppliers of security-sensitive equipment or parts going into products with a low-risk threshold, such as military or aerospace applications. And it’s not just the manufacturers of finished tanks, rockets or airplanes that have to be concerned about parts sourced from other countries. Each distributor and manufacturer of all the subassemblies and the components that go into building them bear the risk of supply chain bubbles and shallows resulting from geopolitical instability.
So, top fastener distributors share the risk with the major aerospace manufacturers that use the screws and rivets to build airplanes. As a result, everyone in the supply chain stays equally subjected to what is going on in the world.
However, as business-minded people lead the charge into the future, companies have found ways to mitigate risks despite global tensions and instability. One way is through computerized manufacturing processes that incorporate advanced tracking and tracing with tools to plan for almost any unexpected contingency.
Harnessing computer technology gives manufacturers, suppliers, buyers, distributors, retailers – in short, everyone involved in the supply chain – the ability to control their respective risks better. Of course, modern manufacturing systems can’t control or predict world events, but they can help company planners prepare for most, if not all, unexpected situations.