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The pandemic shattered the fine art of moving stuff from your fingertips to the front door. Purchases of food, household supplies, and over-the-counter medicines exploded when COVID-19 lockdowns spread across the globe... This triggered severe strains at every level of the nation’s transportation and logistics system.. This has led to a mad scramble for storage, a warehouse space race. 

Join MIT Global SCALE Connect for an in-depth conversation with Paul Granadillo, SVP Global Supply Chain at Moderna. MIT Professor Yossi Sheffi speaks with Paul about how the pandemic vaccine response reshaped manufacturing, business, and supply chains at Moderna.

Shelves at the pet food aisle are looking bare recently, leaving some pet owners scrambling to find the foods their animals need. It's a shortage issue that stems from the global supply chain woes that continues to affect nearly every industry, including pet products. "Demand for goods started going through the roof," noted Yossi Sheffi, director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics and a chain supply professor. Sheffi said the pandemic has led to an increase in pet adoptions, and therefore an increase in pet spending.

Professor Yossi Sheffi, one of the world's leading scholars in the field of supply chain management. Regarding the cause of the global supply chain crisis triggered by the novel coronavirus pandemic, Professor Sheffi said, “The Federal Reserve (the central bank of the United States) can solve trillions of dollars right away with a single signature, but parts or finished products can cost thousands of miles.

Mecalux sat down with Professor Yossi Sheffi, Director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, to talk about how Covid-19 is reshaping businesses and supply chains -and what's coming next. 

Professor Yossi Sheffi spoke with David Pogue of CBS Sunday Morning about what’s causing supply chain breakdowns. "The underlying cause of all of this is actually a huge increase in demand,” says Sheffi. 

Being tasked to manage risk in the supply chain as a job title is relatively new; Resilinc CEO, Bindiya Vakil, took classes from Yossi Sheffi, author of “The Resilient Enterprise,” which talked about supply chain risk in the aftermath 9/11 crisis. One case study in the book included the Philips fab fire caused a massive disruption that led to the exit of Nokia Ericsson from the handset market.  “It was $300 million in revenue impact.

Each December, the focus of the issue is our annual Executive Guide to Supply Chain Resources. This is a comprehensive guide to services, products and educational opportunities targeted specifically to supply chain professionals. 

President Joe Biden met with CEOs of different grocers and major retailers on the supply chain and inflation issues during holiday shopping. “The business leaders gathered here today represent a broad swath of American shopping,” Biden said. Companies like Best Buy, Food Lion, Samsung, Kroger, Walmart and more were there.

“Companies have their own interests in making the supply chain work because otherwise, they’ve got nothing to sell,” MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics Director Yossi Sheffi said.

Most of us know that the COVID vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and J&J were developed, approved and rolled out to the public in record time, and on a global basis. But few of us understand the heroic effort that happened behind the scenes to make this a reality.