People like me, who have been able to work from home, should count the blessings those people have bestowed on us every day — multiple times. More than that, we should be asking what we can do to make life better for them.
But you know all that, so how about a less obvious hero, like — did anyone have “supply-chain managers and operations chiefs” on their list? No? Well I did! Because these individuals have, without much praise and completely invisibly, been making sure that the rest of us had what we needed.
Remember last spring, when toilet paper disappeared from the shelves and flour was suddenly worth almost its weight in gold? That’s because supply chains had been optimized for people leaving their homes a lot — using public restrooms, eating in restaurants, working in large offices. The people who made and distributed that stuff found that suddenly half their customers didn’t need any supplies, and the other half needed twice as much, but not in pallet-sized lots.
As John Church, chief supply chain officer of General Mills, put it, “You don’t build supply chains to spin that way in the food business — it’s not like 30% more people will suddenly join the population.” Yet somehow they coped. We had shortages of various things throughout the spring, but there was still plenty to eat and drink.
That’s because essential distribution companies such as Walmart and Target and Amazon rejiggered systems to prioritize basic products over “nice but not necessary”; because logistics companies such as UPS and Fedex reorganized their operations to cope with an unprecedented surge in demand for deliveries; and because General Mills and other manufacturers figured out how to fill those trucks and warehouses by squeezing more production out of their existing lines while ramping up new capacity.
