From the Director's desk July 2020

Welcome to the second edition of Supply Chain Link for 2020. This issue is the first after New Zealand’s national lockdown and is mainly centred on COVID-19’s effect on supply chains. I trust you have emerged from your bubble safe and healthy.

Our first article, by our Associate Director Marcus Rinaldi, is about how CSCM decided to keep pursuing our mission during the lockdown, and how we managed to investigate the impacts and consequences of this global pandemic on supply chains in eight engaging webinars with experts from industry and academia. I hope that you managed to attend at least one of these, but if not, Marcus’s article gives you the links to the recordings.

We also have two very interesting articles written by Associate Professor Fernando Oliveira, a new colleague here at the Business School, and Mark Singh, Director of IndusHaze Advisory Limited.

Fernando discusses the unprecedented crisis where the oil price dropped below zero for the first time in history, how the US reacted to this crisis, and how COVID-19 can change the current policies in the oil market forever.

In the other article, Mark Singh shares his ideas about how to recover from the current situation to a post-COVID-19 future. He tells us about strategies for supply chain recovery, priorities to translate these strategies into action, and technologies to transform a supply chain into a more sustainable one. We also introduce to you a thought-provoking article about the turbulence ahead for global supply chains by the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Finally, Felicity Lawrence talks about the Strategic Supply Chain executive programme for this year and the unique opportunity it provides for professionals to progress their career in supply chain leadership. We already have a full cohort starting 4 August, so please contact Felicity as soon as possible if you would like her to squeeze you in.

Thank you for your support of the Centre. I suggest that as we return to our regular routines, we take a moment to reflect on what we have gone through and coped with. Also, if you have friends and relations working on border control processes, feel free to send them our way for some logistics and operations best-practice education! A bit more poka-yoke would not be a bad idea.