Time (Zone) Travelers

He seems a bit disappointed that the Chinese team hasn't yet scheduled a time for engineers from Hino to come over to evaluate their progress on the new scanner. "In China, they're young and hungry," he says later. "They don't want to be reliant on anyone else." He tells the Beijing team that time is short and that they'll have to start leaning on their colleagues in the United States and Japan. "If there is a point where help from Milwaukee or Hino would solve a problem, ask for it," he says. "There's no shame in asking for help." The call lasts about 40 minutes.

"There are smart people everywhere in the world," Armstrong says. "Cost may be what gets you to open up an office somewhere, but you need to get beyond that and understand what advantages your people there can bring. You want to hear their different approaches to a problem. Frankly, I don't want to lose that diversity and wind up with everyone thinking like Milwaukee thinks."

Tijuana, Mexico

There are 14 different steps involved in assembling one of Plantronics' MX150 cell-phone headsets, but trying to follow each step as headsets fly from one worker's station to the next here at Line #4 is like trying to see a single flap of a hummingbird's wings. The $30 MX150 is a very hot product -- one of the most popular cell-phone headsets on the market since its introduction last year -- but that's not so hot for Plantronics. Although the maquiladora here in Tijuana produces 230,000 MX150s each week in three shifts, Plantronics is still puffing to keep up with demand.

Hiring is proceeding at a breakneck pace, says Rosa Ruvalacaba, who oversees MX150 production at Plamex, the Plantronics facility here that the company has operated for 32 years. "We added the shifts for the MX150 in April," she says, "and since then, we've hired 600 new people."

But staffing up quickly isn't the only challenge that springs from having such a hot product. Plantronics sells a million MX150s a month (nearly three times as many as it was selling last year), and wireless carriers such as Verizon continue to increase their orders. That has pushed Plantronics to try to cajole suppliers in China to bump up the number of parts they send to Plamex. Some 50,000 cable assemblies, which include the jack that plugs into a cell phone, and the cable itself, arrive each day at Plamex, five days a week. But it's not enough, and that's forcing Plantronics to get even more global.

"It's hard to tell when a product is going to take a run on you," says Terry Walters, senior VP of operations, who works at Plantronics headquarters in Santa Cruz, California, but travels to Tijuana at least monthly. "When the consumer headset market exploded in 1996 and 1997, that created a lot of spikiness for us in terms of orders. And since a lot of our suppliers are in Asia, it's sometimes hard to get them to react quickly enough. They have other customers and other priorities, and right now the economy's expanding, and everyone's trying to buy the parts that we're trying to buy."

Plantronics, a 43-year-old company that made the headset that Neil Armstrong wore when he landed on the moon, already has major operations in the United States, Mexico, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. It has offices in Taiwan and mainland China to prepare engineering drawings for suppliers, and to check on the quality of their output. But by this time next year, the company plans to open its first manufacturing facility in mainland China, in an industrial park in Suzhou, 60 miles west of Shanghai.

Part of the Suzhou strategy involves cost: Walters believes that Plantronics can improve profit margins by making its own cable assemblies and plastic parts. But the main goals are speed and flexibility. "We want to shrink the supply chain," Walters says. "Instead of having a 10-week lead time when we need to increase production at Plamex, I'd like to get to one week."

Shrinking that lead time will let the company adjust more fluidly to sudden surges in orders. "There are lots of ways you can respond to unpredictable demand spikes," says Lyndall Fry, vice president of quality. "We don't want to respond to those spikes with excess inventory and buffer stock -- that's not what flexibility means to us."

Fry speaks German, Spanish, English, and French, and she'll soon be learning Mandarin. On her business card, she has had her Chinese name stamped in red: "Fu Ling." It means jade, and has the connotation of "bringing prosperity," she explains. It was picked out for her with the help of a Plantronics colleague from Taiwan; Fry has since given the whole team Chinese names. She seems to thrive on immersing herself in new cultures. For her last job, at Siemens in Germany, she learned German from scratch.