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Afterword

Untangling the supply web

By PETER BRADLEY

No supply web is ever a static thing, and keeping its parts connected is the supply chain manager's perpetual challenge.

From the Quarter 02 2007 issue

Some years ago, I watched an elementary school teacher use a simple but interesting exercise to illustrate the interconnections among the various components of the environment. In the lesson, each student represented some part of an ecosystem: sun, rain, soil, predator, prey, or plant. As the students named a connection from part to part—sunshine leads to evaporation, which leads to clouds, which leads to rain, which leads to plant growth, which leads to food for herbivores, and so on—they stretched strings of yarn from one person to the next, representing each connection....

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