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“EUROPE HAS NOT BEEN SMART”: IE MEETS PROF. MARCO TAISCH IE speaks to Prof. Marco Taisch about supply chains, the war in Ukraine and how producers can reach the demands of the emerging generation of Sustainability Natives... by Steven Gislam
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ust as Europe was daring to imagine a return to normality after two years of Covid restrictions and lockdowns, Vladimir Putin surprised everybody and ordered the Russian army to invade Ukraine. While the unquestionably devastating humanitarian implications of the war are understandably the immediate focus of the news, the wider reverberations are likely to be felt for several years to come. With every disaster, however, comes opportunity and many experts, already trying to fix the flaws in our supply chains that were laid bare by the pandemic, are concerned that Putin’s war is exacerbating an already difficult situation. IE spoke to Prof. Marco Taisch of Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI), where he teaches Advanced and Sustainable Manufacturing Systems, and Operations Management to get his take on how this will impact Europe, China and beyond. 10 Industry Europe
“Supply chains have not been lucky in the last few years. First, they were affected by the pandemic. We all know what happened because we have a global supply chain. When a lockdown was announced in Wuhan Province, the whole world was affected,” says Taisch. “For the last 20 years, we had a purposely designed lean and global supply chain, but now it’s no longer acceptable.” Hoping that the worst is over in terms of Covid, transport and logistics experts began drawing up plans to redesign supply chains, making them more resilient, more reliable, and crucially, more regional for post-pandemic demands. What logistics managers had already begun doing, according to Prof. Taisch, was to redraw their supply chains along the lines of three macro-regions: the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and Asia-Pacific.
“What is happening in Ukraine and with Russia is showing the need for this more and more. The other thing that the war is showing is that we cannot allow ourselves to have one source of supply anymore, whatever kind of supply we are talking about.” He points out that we, as a society, had gotten used to the cost benefits made possible by supply chains built on lean principles. To keep prices low, sources along the supply chain were often provided from one place. Which, when it worked, it did so superbly, but all it took was one big disruption, like a pandemic, and the whole thing began to buckle. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has meant that neither country is able to export in the same way it could before. Even if the war ends soon, sanctions on Russia are likely to last far longer, making the whole nation almost impossible to trade with. If it doesn’t, then this only serves to prove the point even further.
