Developing Supply Chain Immunity to Future Shocks

May 21, 2020

Healthcare Strategic Stockpile Management Remains a Big Challenge

Beginning in 2015 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine led a standing committee to inform Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) decision-making. This committee included “…state and local public health…

May 11, 2020

We Need Supply Chain Immunity, not Resiliency: A Position Paper

In today’s post I am sharing insights from a position paper that my colleague Dan Finkenstadt, PhD, myself, and other academic and government officers are working on. The paper is…

May 7, 2020

Needed: A National Governance Framework for Healthcare Supply Chains

The Tragedy of the Commons – A situation in which a shared resource system, where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good…

Apr 23, 2020

Lessons Learned from the COVID Pandemic Part 2: Stockpiling!

In Part 2 of this series on pandemic planning, I am again “dusting off” portions of a study I wrote for the IBM Business of Government in 2011, titled “Planning…

Apr 22, 2020

Lessons Learned for Supply Chain Pandemic Planning Part 1: Governance and Risk Assessment

Oddly enough, the lessons learned from the Covid crisis are very similar to the lessons learned from the LAST major epidemic that hit the world, the H1N1 crisis. At that…

Apr 5, 2020

NC State and North Carolina industries step in to provide massive production of new N95 mask and materials

The Nonwovens Institute at North Carolina State University (funded by NWI) has stepped in to convert much of its equipment over to production of a new material that involves just…

Mar 31, 2020

The Perilous State of Healthcare Supply Chains Today: How Did We End Up Here?

In my last couple of blogs, I spoke briefly about the current surge in demand for N95 masks, as well as the number of grocery stores that were experiencing severe…

Mar 25, 2020

Proactive supplier communication is critical in this pandemic

As the coronavirus epidemic shuts down the global economy, supply chain executives should be taking steps now to ensure that their supply base remains intact in the face of massive…

Mar 22, 2020

Where are all the N95 Masks? A Supply Chain Dilemma

An interviewer asked a FEMA representative on CNN this evening a simple question: How many N95 masks will be delivered to hospitals, and when will they arrive? The representative managed…

Mar 2, 2020

Steps for industry and government to prepare for the Coronavirus

As I noted in an earlier blog, the issue of global epidemics is something that we have seen in the past with the SARS epidemic. People sometimes think these come…