Rob Handfield on the New Players of Protective Gear

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March, many never anticipated the vast shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers. The disruption in the PPE supply chains in North Carolina and across the globe is now becoming dependent on new suppliers to fill the gaps.

“At a state level, at a county level, people started reaching out anywhere they possibly could,” said Rob Handfield, executive director of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative and professor of operations and supply chain management. “What you start to see here in this data is that there’s just a huge number of suppliers in a lot of these broader categories that were buying from all over the place.”

Read more on WRAL.

This post was originally published on the Poole College of Management news website here.