CofC professor Purushottam Meena, who specializes in supply chain disruption risk management, breaks down the current supply chain crisis, giving listeners aa behind the scenes approach on the factors that are creating choke points in getting goods where they need to go.
CofC professor Purushottam Meena, who specializes in supply chain disruption risk management, breaks down the current supply chain crisis, giving listeners aa behind the scenes approach on the factors that are creating choke points in getting goods where they need to go.
Hello, and welcome to the College of Charleston Podcast. I'm Mike Robertson from University Communications. In this episode, we speak to purusha. Tom Mena. He's an assistant professor of supply chain management at the College of Charleston, will talk about current problems facing the supply chains all around the world, how it happened, and what it means for consumers in the future. Professor mean, when it comes to the supply chain problems that we're seeing all across the nation, are there certain sectors, business sectors that are suffering more than others? I believe pandemic has pretty much all businesses across the industry. But if we want to specifically talk about what are the sectors which are worse impacted, I will say, then I have to bring the hotel and restaurant sector, those those were the two sectors most affected. And the reason we can see is you know, like during last summer, when in these two sectors, there were some reopening activities, it was very difficult for them to hire new people very quickly, because most people wanted to go out. And they had very little people to work for them. And we have also seen during summer, you know, the number of job, job openings were record high, we had more than 800 Sorry, 8.3 million job openings, still, they were not able to find the people because in these two sectors, predominantly, it's human resource intensive industry, when you are not finding people, it is very difficult to get back to normal. Let's talk about something coming up soon. That's on a lot of people's minds, there has been some talk that the supply chain problems will have a big impact on the items that will be available for the holiday season. Do you see that? Is that a problem we're gonna be facing? Absolutely, I do see that the ongoing shortages and delays are likely to affect this forthcoming Christmas and the holiday season for sure. So because we have also seen like particularly based on my experience, many companies have ordered well in advance, which is intensifying the ongoing shortage issue. What does that means like now we have witnessed one of the largest. The cargo port, as you know, in LA is kind of very busy, where they can't even accommodate, you know, the number of containers which are coming. So, yeah, I mean, during this holiday season, definitely the shortages and delay are something that customer will definitely face because we have bottlenecks almost at each stage of the supply chain. Coming back to this port issue. I can bring em you might be surprised to listen like daily, almost 250,000 containers are waiting in water to be unloaded. And then you can think of like pour those 250,000 containers ista, we need more than 8000 trucks, which can bring that out to you know, like the warehouses. So yes, I believe we will be facing the same issue again. But if I can give one kind of advice to all consumers out there, it's kind of again, opinion that it is it will going to be very difficult to find, like most critical items, please go out and get your Christmas trees. Because if we get them now, we will be kind of freeing up warehouse space because they need those warehouses to store some other items. So go and get your items. As soon as you can go out there and spend money I got you. Alright, let's end it on a two part question here. What needs to happen to get things back to normal and then has the pandemic and the supply chain problems really change the way that businesses will do business in the future? Yeah, again, Oh, very good question. We all are craving, you know, a solution of this issue, what needs to be done to go back to normal? I believe there's no quick solution to it. It will take some time. So because supply chains are going to be on the lower side of inventory and supply. Giving, you know as we just discussed, we have now holiday season coming up so supplies are going to be short, but definitely they can be kind of me Medium term and long term solution for it, I would be very happy to talk about those what companies can do in medium term and long term is to make their supply chain strong and resilient. How they can do it is why including or investing more in collaborative strategies, particularly with the, you know, suppliers down the line like second tier suppliers, or third tier suppliers, because they are the one from where all companies are getting the items. So, that's going to be one thing like bring more collaboration. Other thing we can see from the solution point of view is to simplify the supply chain current supply chains are so complex, because you really do not see where my items are. So there is a lesser visibility and transparency in supply chain. So it would be very, very important in forthcoming time to bring those transparency flexibility as we discussed earlier. And yeah, another from the solution point of view, I would like to bring a kind of in future where of where our supply chains are going to head is towards digitalization. Because already companies have started implementing in technology with IoT Internet of Things, or artificial intelligence, or robotics in warehouses, and also the application of blockchain I personally or work in this area how to make supply chain more transparent. So we'll have lots of data. So use the data and technology to make your supply chain transparent. So if our supply chain are transparent, we can see where the problems are going to be. Another thing from the US perspective, if we want to see the solution and bring supply chain to the normal state, if not sooner, after you know, I believe six months down the line or after a few years is make them more local. Because as I earlier said the supply chains are global. And when you have global supply chain, your control on supply chain is very less. So we have seen in recent here, there is a much talk about reshoring like bringing the manufacturing operations back. So if we got given that it's very costly for companies to produce in us, if you can't bring all operations back, at least bring them near. So that way you will be going you know like you will be having your supplies weary near to your consumer because now our supply chains are far stretched. So those are the solutions I believe I see. To bring supply chain to normalcy as well as in future what could be done, which is the digitalization and use of artificial intelligence. Professor Mina, thank you. You're welcome. It was a pleasure talking to you. This episode of the College of Charleston podcast was written and produced by Amy Mercer from University Communications, recording and sound engineering was done by Jesse Khan's and the staff of the Division of Information Technology. I'm Mike Robertson. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the College of Charleston podcast.