Management lessons from the U.S. dairy sector’s pandemic response

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

September-October 2021

This time every year, we publish Gartner’s Top 25 supply chains, the annual list of the supply chains that have made it to the top, a list that now also includes 5 Masters, or companies that have consistently outperformed year after year. You can read the article in this issue, along with the web exclusive material we publish on scmr.com, to find out what it takes to become a supply chain leader.

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There’s an old adage that you discover true character when faced with adversity. Based on that, what the dairy industry demonstrated during COVID-19 is a remarkable flexibility that allowed it to break away from old practices no longer valuable to its supply chain. That is no easy feat.

While we have made enormous strides in fighting the pandemic it is much more difficult to assess progress mitigating COVID-19’s effects on the supply chain.

For instance, Intel said this summer that the chip shortage may not be fully resolved until 2023. Upholstered furniture ordered mid-year may not appear in your living room until early 2022 due to polyurethane cushioning shortages. And in June, a Bloomberg article suggested that the Fourth of July was a good time to wrap up your holiday shopping. Seriously?

While those are inconveniences, we do emotionally feel the impact of these supply chain disruptions. And we don’t like any of it. That makes it imperative to figure out what’s going on here. It would be even more helpful to fully understand how COVID-19 has changed supply chains and established practices. And it would be best if we could find ways to use those shifts to our advantage rather than being disadvantaged by them going forward.

Probably no supply chain is more vulnerable yet foundational to how we live than food. Who doesn’t remember going to the grocer last year to find meat cases and refrigerated dairy sections severely depleted for extended periods of time? This is far beyond an inconvenience.

Quite simply, the food supply chain is no small potatoes, to coin a phrase. It has an obvious importance for meeting basic human needs but also constitutes a key economic activity.

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