We may have crested the wave of COVID-19 that has already taken more than 116,000 lives (count yesterday), across the U.S., but we are far from out of the woods. An insidious problem continues to threaten our ability to combat future pandemics.
I’m talking about America’s sluggish and antiquated supply chain.
At the height of the pandemic in March and April, nurses in New York were working without adequate personal protection equipment while California warehouses brimmed with supplies — and mask production lines in Fort Worth sat idle.
The Department of Health and Human Services shipped ventilators to Florida in droves while the Northeast desperately needed them.
The problem wasn’t a lack of equipment.
America had plenty of equipment. But we didn’t know where it was located — or how to get the supplies where they needed to be. As a result, we missed the opportunity to slow the outbreak and protect patients and our first responders. Lives were needlessly lost — because of supply chain inefficiency.
“The lack of information transparency is the single biggest impediment to the global supply chain,” notes Dr. Nick Vyas, Executive Director of the Marshall Center for Global Supply Chain Management at the University of Southern California. “It costs us billions of dollars each year and significantly impacts the environment.”
I’ve been investing in people who move goods throughout the world for nearly 30 years.
Moving goods across the globe is a complex…
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