Federal records show at least 628 recalls so far this year, and another 941 in 2006. Globalization accounts for some of this surge. Many U.S. companies depend on overseas production, where quality controls are difficult to monitor. And it's not just hard goods like toys from China. Food, too, arrives by container ship from other countries, and sometimes it's contaminated. So far this year, for example, more than 8,660 cartons of cantaloupe from Costa Rica have been recalled for salmonella risks, according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration records.
"One risk every company faces is a recall," says Jane Barrett, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston. So if recalls are inevitable, a CIO must help create a supply chain ready to cope with them, she says, by quickly providing the relevant data to facilitate the process. And a recall conducted under pressure from federal regulators, an angry public and plaintiff's lawyers tests every supply chain management decision a CIO makes.
Source: CIO, http://cio.com