Front Line
News, trends & tactics in the May 2011 issue of Industrial Engineer
Alternate supply
Disaster in Japan forces manufacturers to look elsewhere
Henry Ford once said that his customers could have any color car as long as they chose black. Well, at the end of March, Ford Motor Co. stopped taking orders for cars painted “tuxedo black.” The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11 knocked out the only plant that produced a key pigment for that color, said Jim Rice, deputy director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics.
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