Notebook OEMs' Supply Risk Woes Continue

It seems that Sony can't seem to get its act together when it comes to producing notebook computer batteries that deliver on expectations. I mean, how hard can it be to build batteries that don't blow up or erase a hard drive's memory? Evidently, it's more difficult than one might think. Consider how "Toshiba Corp announced Friday a recall of about 830,000 lithium-ion batteries manufactured by Sony Corp ... Toshiba said earlier this month that the Sony-made batteries may cause data loss if users suddenly turn off the computers without saving the data." This latest recall comes over a month after a previous recall hit Apple and Dell, who also purchased batteries from Sony. One wonders if either of the three OEMs -- or even the contract manufacturers -- might have been able to avoid this crisis if they had a real-time supplier performance management system integrated with a returns and warranty claims solution. Perhaps they might have counted the lead time to sense and respond to the issue in hours or days, not weeks or months.

- Jason Busch