While some companies are busy consolidating their manufacturing points, others are just as busy decentralizing all over the place. That's why it's necessary to have flexiblity in the supply chain. According to Donald Rosenfield, Director of the Fellows Program for MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing Program, global logistics are more complicated and subject to more influences than are local logistics, and because of that, the design of a global logistics effort has to factor in a lot of uncertainty and change.
Nothing is static.
And, he asserts, because a supply chain has to be adjusted regularly to take all these fluctuating variables into account, it has to have extra capacity.