Enduring Lessons from the COVID 19 Pandemic

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the March-April 2021 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

March-April 2021

Last night, my wife and I shared a socially distanced bonfire with a few friends. One was a retired physician who is spearheading the vaccination effort in the small New Hampshire city where I live. New Hampshire has had its challenges getting needles into arms like everywhere else, but it seems as if we’re breaking through the log jam. For example, between week 1 and week 3, they’ve tripled the number of people they can vaccinate in a day, and they’ve expanded from five days a week to seven days a week. At least for now, there has not been a shortage of vaccines. I know there is a long way to go, but you can feel it picking up speed. Call me…

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As companies recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, more attention is being paid to the lessons learned from the global crisis.

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.

Common lessons

Flex helps enterprises to design and build products, and as such, operates in a business-to-business environment. New Balance is a manufacturer of athletic footwear and fitness apparel, and hence, is a consumer-facing enterprise. These differences give rise to different perspectives on the pandemic, yet the lessons learned by Torrel and Wheeler should resonate with most companies.

Speeding up digitalization. The digitalization of supply chains was underway before the coronavirus erupted in late 2019, but the pandemic accelerated this trend and illuminated how companies can harness the digital transformation of supply chains.

Torrel notes that as the disruptions reverberated through supply chains, practitioners were required to make decisions on the basis of imperfect information. This challenge “validated the investments that Flex has made over the past years in our digitalization tools,” she says. In particular, the tools helped the company make quick decisions when handling the daily challenges of managing the pandemic.

A prime example is Flex’s Pulse system that provides real-time visibility into the company’s global supply chain. Team members are able to access the system via their PCs or through one of nine Pulse Centers around the world featuring wall-length screens. While the Pulse system has been evolving since it was introduced in 2015, the pandemic added a new dimension to this evolutionary track. An example, says Torrel, is the need to enhance the information on the status and financial health of sub-tier suppliers. Achieving this “will require third-party partners to support us with that information” she says.

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