Day 4 Logistics
Saigon, a city in perpetual motion. Thousands of people on the move. Cars, bicycles, mopeds. Weaving, turning, moving, all autonomous yet somehow in sync. A symphony of people and machines moving to some unknown drumbeat. Structured and organized chaos.
Today I met with some local students who agreed to take me on a tour of the city via mopeds. Riding on the back of a moped with a 19 year old girl in the midst of a thousand if not a million other riders, it’s an experience I won’t soon forget.
A reoccurring thought kept coming to mind: logistics, it was every where. It is now no surprise to me that the Japanese came up with and honed the concept of Just in Time inventory management. I make the connection in that Vietnam shares a common Asian culture. So if there is a million moped riders here, there must be a thousand street vendors selling anything from ponchos to bowls of phó.
What do they have in common? Competition from thousands of other vendors, inventory constraints, time constraints, space constraints, changing demand, constraints in procurement, constraints in choice of suppliers, capital constraints, the list goes on and sounds eerily familiar to the modern corporate marketplace. Today I saw JIT in action everywhere we went.
How does a street vendor ensure they have just enough food to meet demand for the day? How do they minimize spoilage? How do they get the items they need to meet the customization customers want? Where do they store excess inventory to meet spikes in demand while having a simple food cart measuring only 2x3x3 ?
Just in time, it was everywhere. Supplier relationships seemed to be the key to making it all work. But how are supplier relationships measured here? I doubt they keep supplier score cards on hand or develop metrics on competing suppliers. These relationships seem to have come from a time long past. These relationships were made on hand shakes and hard work, maybe an accompanying smile, or just having the right product at the right place at the right time. On my tour de moped across Saigon I witnessed countless street vendors being resupplied by way of mopeds strapped down with produce or products. Several times I saw inventory constraints, where street vendors would utilize existing public infrastructure to hang products from. When the rain started I saw mopeds strapped with packages of ponchos rushing about to resupply poncho vendors, demonstrating they knew demand would increase. At lunch when we asked for bread the waiter said one moment, he left his store and returned with bread in hand. No doubt he went to a vendor down the street, purchased the bread and resold it to us.
Saigon is a demand city. Whatever you want, when you want it so long as you can afford to buy it. That is a part of the charm and allure of this city. Everything has a price, everything has a market value. For a communist country they seem to have a fair grasp of capitalism, for better or worse. So like our concept of Just in Time, this blog is coming in Just in Time to start the next one.