For those of you who may be concerned about manufacturing competition from China, this week's blogs may be of interest. This 2-parter blog comes from a TV show I saw last week on the Discovery Channel.

A Taiwanese company, EUPA, has a complex in China that covers 8 square kilometers and has 17,000 employees. The largest building is over 4 football fields in length and workers use bicycles to get around.

One manager can be responsible for as many as 30 production lines, producing a variety of household products, including 50,000 electric grills per day.

EUPA has determined that the best way to meet supply chain demands is if they make all of the components they need themselves and they're produced on-site. If something is in short supply, it's just a bike ride away for a manager to ramp up production of parts required.

We generally think of Chinese products as cheap and nasty, but this company takes quality control very seriously and it is a key priority in all production. Even among China's however many billion people, up to 2.5 million new coffee makers are only scraping the surface of the home market, and familiar household names are being produced for the export markets. The company even uses solar cells to keep production as green as possible.

With a cheap and endless supply of labour, EUPA hires the best candidates from all across China. Later in the week, I'll go into more detail about these workers and how they devote their lives to EUPA. As if that isn't enough to get you thinking.....

If you have any comments or thoughts you'd like to share, do not hesitate to contact me at carol@workforceplanningboard.com