The advantage of global view for products and services in support of business is ability of company to react to natural disaster or crisis in any area. There are number of companies which were influenced by earthquake and tsunami in Japan. One of my main vendors had major production facility in flood zone and loss of this vendor would have shut down one of our main product lines. Luckily this business had global view and distributed/redundant manufacturing. While it took bit of time for them to get production volume up in Vietnam, volume was recovered in a reasonable period of time. Without this global view and implementation not only would company had major losses but so would their customers.
With such distribution of production there are frequently major issues to make particualr quality and product consistency is maintained. We do have vendors which are permitted to ship us products from one manufacturing facility but we will not accept them from another. Anyone else have instances of advantages and disadvantages of redundant sites for manufacturing?