Leverage Your Assets
In a volatile market(不穩定市場) where product life cycles are short, it's better to own fewer assets-thus goes the conventional wisdom(傳統觀點) shared by many senior managers, stock analysts, and management gurus(領袖、專家). Zara subverts(顛覆) this logic. It produces roughly half of its products in its own factories. It buys 40% of its fabric from another Inditex firm, Comditel (accounting for almost 90% of Comditel's total sales), and it purchases its dyestuff(染料) from yet another Inditex company. So much vertical integration(垂直整合) is clearly out of fashion in the industry; rivals(競爭者) like Gap and H&M, for example, own no production facilities. But Zara's managers reason that investment in capital assets can actually increase the organization's overall flexibility.
Owning production assets gives Zara a level of control over schedules and capacities that, its senior managers argue, would be impossible to achieve if the company were entirely dependent on outside suppliers, especially ones located on the other side of the world.
The simpler products, like sweaters in classic colors, are outsourced to suppliers in Europe, North Africa, and Asia. But Zara reserves the manufacture of the more complicated products, like women's suits in new seasonal colors, for its own factories (i8 of which are in La Corufia, two in Barcelona, and one in Lithuania, with a few joint ventures(合資企業) in other countries). When Zara produces a garment(服裝) in-house(內部), it uses local subcontractors(承包商) for simple and labor-intensive(勞動密集) steps of the production process, like sewing.
These are small workshops, each with only a few dozen employees, and Zara is their primary customer. Zara can ramp up(產能提升) or down production of specific garments quickly and conveniently(便利地) because it normally operates many of its factories for only a single shift. These highly automated