The Scramble

Offshoring is when a company moves all or some of their factories to other countries with a much lower labor cost. Many companies have had to do this to keep up with their fields of work. It is becoming almost a standard of any business to offshore at least part of your labor focus, business must adapt or die, this is a changed world. There are many countries in the continent of Asia that offer business the chances at low cost high quality work. America must learn to live with the fact we have lost a lot of power when it comes to keeping factories in the USA. We cannot compete with low the cost of taxes and labor cost. But we must find a way to use what we have been given, and Asia has given us a way to cut cost and apply it in other areas. The big difference between offshoring and outsourcing is that offshoring moves all production of a factory from a place like America to a much lower cost of labor country to some place mainly in Asia. Outsourcing only moves limited function to other countries with lower cost of labor. It is hard to think that to keep up with this flat world we must lose jobs to gain some, but that is just the nature of the beast. Low skilled jobs are going to always have good chances to be offshored or outsourced, our country really needs to promote education during k-12. I was talking with my sister who is an 8^th grade teacher, I told her that our k-12 schools should really capitalize on India’s low cost of tutoring for students that are stunning. I feel if we could do this it would be a great way to use this changing and ever flatting world.

A supply chain is when a company and the manufactures work in unison to provide goods. The steps that lead to it are something like this delivery, sorting, packing, distribution, buying, manufacturing, redoing. I have worked in a distribution center for seven years so I feel I have a good understanding of almost every part besides the manufacturing aspect. I can tell personally it is things like food and water that will always follow this chain because of the never ending demand for them. Many companies use outsources distribution to spread their product to a much larger amount of stores. Companies like Wal-Mart have many distribution centers of their own in almost every state. Wal-Mart uses their supply chain to their advantage by being able to buy goods in volume directly from the manufacturers. They also save money by using their distribution centers and not having to pay a third party. Wal-Mart has also opened its sales inventory database to suppliers to help make the chain even faster.

Google has changed the landscape of businesses and advertised, you now can type in what you are looking for and you will find results. The businesses ads would show after searching for specific topics, and then Google could charge the businesses for how many times it clicked on the ad. Google has changed how companies go about the level of work of people by being able to use google to look up reviews on them. It also has made ads more geared to the people that would be searching for that subject. This more direct advertisement approach has helped reach people that the ads were meant for. Before this direct advertisement approach, ads were just put out in the hope that the target audiences would see China has changed the way the world looks at manufacturing costs, it is now a must to use offshoring or outsourcing. Wal-Mart and China have shaped how the world is going to look in the foreseeable future with their push of low cost everything.

 The 10^th flatteners really just made all of the others just become even more overpowering. I feel that with the addition of the 10th flattener it is becoming easier to be able to use all of the previous flatteners to make the world so much more interconnecting and leveled the playing field completely. UPS does so much more then I would have guessed, I can’t believe they have their hand in everything. I found this week’s reading of “The World Is Flat’ by Thomas Friedman to just be a real eye opener of how fast the world changed because of the elements of outsourcing and insourcing. Also how China simultaneously has become Americas worst and best nightmare.