As President Donald Trump threatens tariffs on Mexico, Canada, China, and others, it has left supply chain professionals in a state of confusion about how they should react. Where should they go? What do they tell the CEO?
A recent post on LinkedIn suggested the best approach was to wait for the tariff and then raise your prices. The theory, the author explained, was that we couldn’t know which country might be next on the list of potential tariffs, so making a decision on where to move supply chains or switch suppliers would prove to be difficult.
Carla DeSantis, operations transformation partner at PwC, tends to agree to a point—it will be difficult to know where to go to avoid tariffs. So, she told Supply Chain Management Review that taking a holistic approach to supply chain management is the best path forward. Successful businesses, she argued, should not make critical supply chain or value chain decisions based solely on the impact of tariffs.
“We can still go back to [the question of whether] he is playing a negotiation ploy or is it about immigrants. I think it goes beyond that. I think he wants [reshoring],” DeSantis told SCMR. “If you are trying to make those choices tied to cost of manufacturing or cost of supply, I think you are telling only part of the story. And I think that is where clients get [tied up] and don’t think it through.”
Visit SCMR.com to view the full story