Consider Butterfield’s decision to outsource the insulation material. In mapping their supply chain strategy, the management group noted that outsourcing the material would be hard to do because making lining fabric adhere to the insulation fabric was an art that depended on weather conditions, on which manufacturer had supplied the yarn used to weave the insulation fabric, and on a host of other factors that were not easy for the operators to describe. It typically took several years of experience before skilled operators understood how to tweak various process controls to adjust for the complex interactions between fabrics and adhesives. The team concluded that outsourcing the insulation material under these conditions would fail because operators would have little understanding of the materials they were working with