Creating an unbreakable chain feature
Supply chains were devastated by COVID-19, but smart technology can help ensure it won’t happen again.
The pandemic created a crisis that few industries were prepared to deal with. But as with every crisis, lessons can be learned and positive change can result when the world recovers, said Paul Jan, a noted supply chain consultant and instructor for DCE’s Supply Chain Management certificate program. One piece of good news is that people are finally learning the vital importance of healthy supply chains, the lifeblood of the world’s economies.
When COVID-19 began spreading throughout the world, it rapidly wreaked havoc on global supply chains. Factories closed, workers were sent home, and transportation was severely impacted. Many essential products suddenly became dangerously scarce — ventilators, N95 masks, medicines and eventually food items like milk, meat, and eggs.
“Before the pandemic, people would ask what I did for a living, and when I told them I was a supply chain consultant, they’d just get this blank look on their face,” he said, laughing. “It has always been a process nobody really understood or paid attention to. Now everybody is well aware of how important it is. The pandemic has focused a lot of attention on this process which people used to take for granted.” It was especially significant that the pandemic started in China, a manufac-
The DCE Supply Chain Management certificate program provides in-depth understanding of how end-to-end supply chain works… with an eye to creating a more sustainable and flexible system.
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UCI Division of Continuing Education magazine
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Fall 2020
turing and export giant. Supply chains around the world were impacted in a short period of time. “Factories in China always shut down for about a month during Chinese New Year, and companies take this into consideration and buffer up during this period,” Jan said. “What happened this year, though, is the shutdown was prolonged for an indefinite period because of COVID-19. Suddenly, crossborder and cross-continent delivery chains that were reliable were breaking. And there were no plans or resources in place to mitigate the damage. It wasn’t until mid-to-late March that China began to open up again.” As the virus spread throughout China, Europe, India and the rest of the world, many supply chains slowed to a halt, including in the U.S., partly due to overreliance on the Just-In-Time inventory management strategy, but more importantly due to the lack of end-to-end supply chain visibility. JIT simply means that production begins when orders are placed and inventory stock is only delivered as needed, a strategy that saves on warehousing and inventory costs but falls apart when materials and finished goods cannot arrive in a timely manner. “With JIT, if one link in the chain is broken, the entire system could break down,” Jan said. “However with lack of visibility, or lack of ‘control tower,’ no one knows when, how, and how much
