Christmas. Toys. Two things that belong together. But it isn’t always a happy story. Not only do seasons play a big role in supply and demand, so do fads; what is popular today may not be so anymore tomorrow, and as if that wasn’t enough to cope with, product safety issues are probably keeping more CEOs up at night than the unpredictability of sales figures. The year 2007 will be particularly remembered as the year the toy industry was shaken by a seemingly endless stream of recalls. Way ahead of this, in 2001, M Eric Johnson wrote Learning From Toys: Lessons in Managing Supply Chain Risk from the Toy Industry. Here he shows that how the toy industry handles supply chain risk is applicable to many other industries as well.

Continue reading →