Panel Discussion: The great supply chain disruption

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the March-April 2022 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

March-April 2022

Yesterday, I hosted a webinar on the steps supply chain leaders are taking to redesign their supply chains to cope with this period of unprecedented demand. Earlier last month, I attended the Manifest conference in Las Vegas. The exhibitors featured a lineup of supply chain startups while the attendee list was dominated by venture capital firms looking to get in on the action in our booming industry. This morning, one of the lead news stories is about another disruption threatening to bring global supply chains to a halt:

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This is an extraordinary time for business. Regardless of the industry, or whether a company serves other businesses or sells directly to the consumer, supply chain managers and their teams are operating in an extremely dynamic environment. In addition to meeting customer expectations for high variety, rapid delivery and reasonable costs, supply chains are struggling to keep up with shortages of talent, transportation assets and supply.

Meanwhile, there has been a significant increase in role responsibilities for supply chain professionals at almost every level. Last fall, Abe Eshkenazi, the CEO of the Association for Supply Chain Management, and Bob Trebilcock, the editorial director of Supply Chain Management Review, hosted a live episode of The Rebound * podcast at ASCM Connect 2021, ASCM’s annual conference. They brought together three experienced supply chain executives to explore the issues facing their organizations as our industry rebounds in a post-COVID world. They were: Pat Bower, senior director of supply chain from chemicals supplier Aceto; Marcia Brey, vice president of distribution for GE Appliances; and Chris Pickett, chief strategy officer for Flock Freight.

Abe Eshkenazi: Pat, why don’t you kick things off and tell us what is top of mind for Aceto.

Pat Bower: We make products that range from chemicals to help to make vaccines and medicines work better to chemicals used in cleaning products for standard consumer goods. Regardless of the chemical, there’s been an uptick in demand. Regardless of what consumers are buying, every one of them has a tremendous desire for really timely product availability. The product doesn’t matter. Since the pandemic started, I’ve moved from a consumer goods company to the chemical industry. Consumer behaviors are the same in both. I’m guessing, Marcia, that GE Appliances has seen that too.

Marcia Brey: I think you said it well, Pat. What you saw applies to the appliance industry too. What surprised us the most was just how quickly demand change happened. I’d like to think that we have good forecasting models, but, like many, our forecasts for the future are dependent on the past. All of a sudden, we had to throw it all out the window.

Within six weeks, we went from a make-to-stock business to a make-to-order business because we had drained all of our inventory throughout our network, yet the demand kept coming. Fortunately, we had started to invest in certain areas that helped us, but, in a short period of time, we immediately went into a tactical mode of one-by-one problem-solving. We started asking how do we meet our commitments to our customers? How do we create commitments we can deliver? It all had to change.

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