Alright so I was reading a bit of info on how Nintendo makes the Wii, and basically the lack of supply is due to the company they get to make certain parts of the Wii cant keep up with demand, so the thing I was thinking is why dont they get another company to help make the same part?  I know its not that simple but you gotta know companies would jump at the chance to cash in on the Wii, if the levels are maxed at ~1 to 1.5 million a month they could always get another company to make about .5 million of the part they need even that would help some with all the demand out there. 

Also all of the constraints on supply has made some people so mad to the point where they're boycoting Nintendo, which is lost business for the company and a little bad reputation to boot, just seems to me the smart business thing to do would be take their product to a company that could make the parts faster, hopefully to the point of DS like production. 

All in all I think they will get things figured out cause if I remember right they had a few of the same problems with DS when it really took off the year after it was released, but maybe they should have prepared better this time. 

See the thing isn't that they can't bump up production, its more that they are doing it slowly, they overproduced the GCN and got burned when demand was low, so they are slowly bumping it up with incremental increases so as to not overproduce. Now it takes about five months to bump up production, so they can't change production on a dime, they've already bumped it up twice last year, and will probably bump it up more this year, and at the moment are producing a very large number of Wii's

I believed this topic has been over discussed.

Over discussion of Nintendo is impossible

Multiple companies producing the same part is a part of most large scale supply chains.  A good portion of supply chain management deals with how to get those parts where they are needed when they are needed regardless of where they comes from or how many locations they come from and how varied the travel time between those places and the final destination is.  

So to that point, they are already doing it.

As for the production issue as a whole they are definitely ramping up production but as was mentioned they are trying to do it in spurts so that the can take the time to assess the situation before upping production to avoid being burned again.  Many people have said they are being cautious or conservative but that logically brings the question of "How can a company that is producing more consoles per month than any other console ever has, (and got to that point within the first 9 months) be considered conservative?" 

you have to remember that when a manufacturing company enters into a contract with another company, there is a clause which states how many widgets the manufacturers are to produce and how long they are to do it for. There also needs to be time for the manufacturers to re-tool their production like to build the widgets.

Nintendo needs to be sure not just that demand is high now, but that demand will continue to be at that level perhaps one year in advance.

There are not that many places that have the ability to produce the high tech MEMS incorporated in the Wiimote. And half of them are working on apple projects now.
Even if there are places that produce MEMS, the quantity is like a few thousand a best in a month, so I don't see a way to increase the production unless the companies that can make 400 thousand a month find a way to increase that by 25% which would make it another 100 thousand.

 That would lead to a WiiMote supply problem, not Wii supply problem. And there are most likley 2-2.5 WiiMotes sold sep. for every wii (Lets say 3 total). That blows the 400 thousand a month totaly out of the water?!?!

@Sqrl, Sony was producin over 2 million per month of PS2 at it's high point, but that was about 2.5 years after release, so although it is not the highest home console production per month it is the highest for it's first year.

Nintendo has been brilliant about this entire DS/Wii situation but they could have been slightly more brilliant.

Scaling production slowly and cautiously is good business. Scaling business and production this slowly to keep up demand is short-sighted.

The problem Nintendo faces is not that they're keeping demand up, it's that they're completely shorting the consumer. They could up Wii production by 300k a month and still not meet demand and they would still run short of consoles.

Nintendo's fault lies in the fact that they haven't tried to *just short* consumers to keep the Wii hyped; they have massively underfilled orders because they're too damned cautious.

Nintendo, as much as they are compared to Apple, need a few lessons from the marketing boys in Cupertino.