There is more to globalization than simply building a plant on a different continent, shipping finished goods overseas, or complying with an ISO standard. Globalization is the integration of capital, technology, and infrastructure across national borders, in a way that is creating a single global market and, to some degree, a global village. More than anything else, the Internet is the primary force driving globalization today, effortlessly spanning cultural and political divides, even transcending space and time. We can sit at our computers and virtually travel the world, blissfully ignorant of traditional constraints like geographical distance and time zones. Regrettably, however, the ease of using the Internet has led many to believe that globalization can be just as simple.
Globalization represents a tremendous challenge.
It's 2001, but instead of floating through space effortlessly communicating with other worlds, we're still having problems just selling across borders. The hard reality is that true globalization presents enormous challenges, not only in manufacturing, but in marketing, purchasing, and other core business functions as well. The resources and creativity needed to overcome them are great. In this article, we offer a brief survey of these challenges as a prerequisite to understanding and appreciating the work of the companies involved in the case studies that follow. A significant obstacle to globalization is the very pace of change itself.