Director’s Blog
Tom Linton’s Advice to Students: “Don’t Listen to the Status Quo!”
“If you go to a hospital and a nursing station in a hospital, there may be 2 or 3 nurses, managing 30 or 40 patients. Each patient has a pulse, and the nurses are monitoring all the patients by exception. […]
The Strategic National Stockpile that Failed Us
The COVID-19 crisis arrived in the United States in February and was largely dismissed as a non-threatening issue. In particular, the CDC was convinced that it had contained the virus and retained control of all diagnostic testing, which later produced […]
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 officials, representatives of medical manufacturing and distribution companies, logistics managers, […]
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 an attempt to create some logic in the fact of […]
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 of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource […]
Catastrophic Impacts of COVID19 in Bangladesh Apparel Supply Chain
An article written by my former PhD student, Rejaul Hasan, and I just came out this week in Contracting Excellence, the journal published by IACCM, which documents the catastrophe that is unfolding in Bangladesh, one of the world’s major exporters […]
The Current State of PPE in Healthcare: Guest Post from Professor Blan Godfrey
In the last few weeks, me and my research team of Beena, Nikhil, and Pratyush have been communicating frequently with Professor Blan Godfrey, and his team of graduate students taking his Six Sigma class. Dr. Godfrey is the Joseph D. […]
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 for the Inevitable: The Role of the Federal Supply Chain […]
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 time, I wrote a study for the IBM Business of […]
Outcomes from our Post-Covid Seminar: Supply Chains Shifts, Leadership Communication, and a Rough Economic Forecast
The SCRC held our first webinar panel today (video embedded below), which was attended by over 90 people, with another 200 who signed up for the recording. The webinar featured myself, commenting on some of the attributes of the global […]