By Stan Aronow In late October, I had the privilege of moderating a virtual Leaders in Action (LIA) event with a group of twenty COOs and CSCOs representing a range of large global companies. This interactive event, themed “Thriving in the Post-Pandemic World,” was designed to give supply chain leaders the opportunity to share their perspectives and hear from peers about “What’s next” for the supply chain and global business as the impacts of the pandemic subside. The specific topics we explored included: How will nationalistic market interventions drive further adaption of supply ecosystems ..read more

In its report Ethically-Aligned Design for Business: A Call to Action for Businesses Using AI, the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (A/IS) contends that the duty to implement AI ethically belongs to everybody who works with it. The report states: “It is easy for anyone to say, ‘I am not an ethicist, so it is not my responsibility,’ but this is not solely about efficiency of business processes, but about holding the human at the center of all design. Designers, developers, and other stakeholders should never work in a vacuum and must always stay in tune wit ..read more

Welcome to the Winter 2020 edition of Supply Chain Navigator. Remember the good old days…in 2019…when seeing grocery shelves filled with toilet tissue and disinfectant spray didn’t feel like a luxury? It’s been a year, for sure. Given all the upheaval, it is easy to get bogged down in thinking about everything that has gone wrong over the past 10 months or so, but when you look at the news and see headlines like “Supply Chain Readies to Deliver 9 Million COVID-19 Vaccines Per Day,” we are reminded that 2020 has also been a year of incredible accomplishment. Even as a person who has worked in a ..read more

SCN: It’s been quite a year. What’s your impression of how the tech supply chain has handled the unprecedented disruption of the global pandemic? DH: I would have to say that the overall response has been positive. The industry has been through enough of these events and cycles that supply chain organizations have built up capabilities, knowledge sharing and intelligence to respond end to end. While I can’t speak for the whole tech sector, given the extraordinary nature of this crisis, our experience at Molex shows the improvements the global supply chain ecosystem has put in place. We benefit ..read more

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of thousands of businesses have gone under, tens of millions of people have lost their jobs and over a million individuals have perished. Covid-19 is not just another black swan event, but the heavy-weight champion of all Black Swans. While black swan events are, by definition, unpredictable, Professor and Director of the MIT Data Science Lab David Simchi-Levi believes enterprises can better position themselves to outmaneuver the uncertainty of future supply chain disruptions by instituting more sophisticated risk management tools that proacti ..read more

How applying various supply chain resilience levers helped us persevere amid Covid-19 disruptions By Lynn Torrel As an organization managing some 1,000 supply chains on our customers’ behalf, Flex is constantly evaluating our risk mitigation models. We identify, evaluate and mitigate risks through three lenses: Serving our customers: Understanding our obligations to customers requires an understanding of the risks in the chain. This begins with identifying the most critical components and mapping out their associated risks. For example, are there seasonal shortages of critical parts or poten ..read more

By Mark Cotteleer and John Wilczynski By the time the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak to be an official “global pandemic” in early March 2020, demand for critical goods, including personal protective equipment (PPE), medical devices and diagnostic testing equipment, was already skyrocketing. Consumers ranging from governments to hospital systems and even individual citizens were urgently stockpiling emergency provisions, including unexpectedly scarce commodities like toilet tissue. At the same time, rolling stay-at-home orders, spiking infection rates and widespread fe ..read more

By Morgan Swink and Jeroen Kusters When the Supply Chain Operational Reference (SCOR) model was introduced in 1996, it truly revolutionized the practice of supply chain management. The SCOR plan-source-make-deliver framework provided a method for businesses, big and small, to align functions, create a supply chain roadmap and measure and manage processes from “the supplier’s supplier to the customer’s customer.” But our world was very different back then. The World Wide Web was in its infancy. Amazon.com was a start-up online book dealer, and Google was still two years from being founded. Toda ..read more

Lisa Butters’ kids that two years ago she could barely spell blockchain; today she is general manager of the aerospace sector’s first blockchain-based e-commerce marketplace for used serviceable and new surplus parts inventory – GoDirect Trade. Butters’ journey from blockchain novice to resident expert began when she was tapped by Honeywell Aerospace leadership to “crack the e-commerce nut” in the parts aftermarket, which was pegged at $4.9B in 2018, according to The Insight Partners. Despite the many entities that have launched online storefronts seeking to shift the industry into the digital ..read more

SCN: Can you give us an update on what ECIA is seeing in terms of the impacts of the global pandemic on the electronic components sector. DF: Of course. As it became clear in January that the Covid-19 virus was not merely a local outbreak in the Wuhan province, ECIA began conducting bi-weekly surveys of member manufacturing and distributor companies so we could provide our partners, and the tech sector at large, with as much visibility as possible into how the evolving crisis would impact the supply chain. a new report was issued, need to update response: In the most recent survey, for the two ..read more