SUPPLY-CHAIN STRETCH

OPPORTUNITY AND CHALLENGE. BOTH are by-products of globalization for many U.S. manufacturers. New markets open both for finished goods and for the sourcing of raw materials and components-but the supply chain stretches. Consequently, supplier lead times lengthen; the demand for their products remains

On a domestic scale, customers' demands for product on a just-in-time basis continue to challenge suppliers, while manufacturers remain in pursuit of ways to reduce the amount of inventory they carry.

To meet these challenges and opportunities, U.S. manufacturers look increasingly to their value-chain partners for assistance, both by outsourcing logistics efforts to third-party providers and by partnering more closely with their valued suppliers.

StorageTek de Puerto Rico, a company of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems Inc. and a 2005 IW Best Plants winner, for example, holds approximately 70% of its inventory in its Supplier Logistics Center (SLC), a warehouse or inventory hub operated by a third-party provider and located less than one mile from StorageTek's manufacturing facility in Ponce. That third-party provider handles transactions related to incoming inventory from StorageTek suppliers and delivers inventory to StorageTek in response to pull signals from the manufacturing floor.