Supply Chain

The hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine is heating up. Scientists and pharmaceutical companies globally are researching and developing around 100 vaccine candidates, with at least 10 currently in early phases of human testing, according to the World Health Organization. The U.S. government has narrowed its vaccine candidate list to seven, NPR reported.

The great challenge of something such as COVID-19 is that we don’t have the time to do decades of research to understand the effectiveness — or lack of effectiveness — of any given approach. We have to act. That means, though, that we could be “successful” at handling COVID-19 yet still fail society due to unmeasured impacts.

Christopher Tang, professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, describes what it will take for hospital and healthcare supply chains to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 was a “wakeup call” for supply chains, Tang says. A nation that ostensibly has an abundance of materials discovered that it could be subject to serious shortages of critical supplies needed to fight a pandemic, such as personal protective equipment and ventilators. “We need to rethink how we can do better,” he says.

Jonathan Cotliar knew he was ahead of the curve four years ago when he joined Science 37, a company that supports virtual clinical trials conducted mostly online. The firm in Los Angeles, California, was growing slowly before March, receiving about a dozen calls a week from potential clients. But since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Science 37 has been running at fever pitch.

The rug has been pulled out from beneath us. Doing things the same way we’ve always done them will no longer serve us, so we can’t simply put it back in its place. In fact, the definition of pulling the rug out from underneath someone is that doing so causes their plans to fail, because they have little recourse or time to respond adequately. It’s a fitting metaphor for the world’s supply chains, which have always had to figure out how to respond rapidly in the face of rug-tugging disruptions, although none at the scope of the current one. We can count on disruption occurring again, in some form, so the only way to respond is to build in the supply chain agility necessary to be able to respond more effectively next time our rug is yanked.

If there’s any certainty in an uncertain world economy right now, it’s that the coronavirus crisis is shaking up the way global businesses think about their supply chains.

Farm Talk Segment 5 – Anna Nagurney – University of Massachusetts

“My C-Level execs need to hear this!” Such was one shipper’s response I received after publishing a recent Two Minute Warning about how too many executives take their supply chains for granted. Candidly, I know that this is a challenging message for C-Level executives to hear, because over the years I’ve received several calls and had conversations with presidents and CEOs who have expressed concerns about the effectiveness of their supply chain.

Global supply chains have seen significant disruption from the spread of COVID-19. For crop protection, it has interrupted production along the entire crop input value chain — from raw materials to manufacturing to packaging to distribution to transportation.

The global pandemic has exposed serious flaws in supply chains, including critical ones for industries such as pharma and medical supplies. Shortages of personal protective equipment for health workers and ventilators in hospitals are the most prominent ones. To prevent this problem from occurring again when the next disaster strikes, governments should consider establishing a stress test for companies that provide critical goods and services that’s akin to the stress tests for banks that the U.S. government and European Union instituted after the 2008 financial crisis. This test should focus on the resilience of companies’ supply chains.