Trade and Media Publications

What can the pandemic teach us about the supply chains of the future?

Adapted from The New (Ab)Normal: Reshaping Business and Supply Chain Strategy Beyond Covid-19. Copyright (c) 2020 by Yossi Sheffi. Used with permission of the publisher, MIT CTL Media Cambridge, Mass. All rights reserved.

Vaccines are helping us survive this pandemic. The climate emergency requires a similar leap in technology and the international co-operation needed to deliver it, says Yossi Sheffi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

More than 74 million Americans think differently from the prevailing wisdom found on elite university campuses. Universities could help bridge that divide.

Many institutions of higher education, as well as high schools, media outlets, and businesses are engaged in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. At universities, these efforts have centered on student admission, faculty hiring, and mandatory reeducation of all faculty and staff using actors to play scenarios of racism and exclusion. Those efforts define DEI in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

On most university campuses as well as in many institutions, notably media outlets and some corporations, DEI efforts are focused on internal staff. At universities, these reform efforts have centered on students’ admissions, faculty hiring, and a plethora of activities aimed at re-education. Those efforts, as well as MIT’s, define DEI in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and related parameters. In particular, universities argue that diversity of race, gender, and sexual orientation is important to generate a vibrant learning and research environment.

The MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics asked two leaders, Lynn Torrel, the chief procurement officer and supply chain officer at Flex, and Dave Wheeler, the chief operating officer at New Balance, to relate their pandemic experiences. The executives learned much about managing supply chains in extreme adversity, and how such a crisis requires companies to be innovative.

Despite the shaky circumstances upon which many industries find themselves in 2021, the window on North America’s economy given by the petrochemical industry is showing a positive picture, even as companies experience both cyclical and structural shifts. The business of this critical sector, which touches 96% of all manufactured goods and in the US accounts for a quarter of GDP, is having to adapt its supply lines to the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic while at the same time dealing with forces from both end-markets and its raw materials

Read an excerpt from Inbound Logistics January 2021 issue, which features a piece from Professor Yossi Sheffi's latest book, The New (Ab)Normal. 

During the pandemic, stay-at-home consumers switched to online buying, and the 2020 roll call of bricks-and-mortar bankruptcies reads like a “who’s who” of retailing, however, the pandemic has also unleashed a wave of unparalleled supply chain innovation. {Originally published in Supply Chain Management Review}

Large-scale disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic cause huge supply/demand imbalances due to interruptions in supply or surges in demand. In an unstable environment, companies often have to prioritize which customers they serve. Past disruptions reveal how companies on both ends of the supply chain have handled such challenges, both in terms of tactics they employed and considerations they used for their decisions.

The second part of the Management Business Review, which is a response to Professor Sheffi's "The Real Inconvenient Truth" article.