Resilience in Supply Chains: Working together to achieve overarching logistics objectives
Large-scale national and regional crises occur, however many governments might wish that they wouldn’t. Natural disasters, such as floods, hurricanes, fires, or earthquakes. Terrorist incidents, civil unrest, or security alerts. Pandemics—think foot-and-mouth disease, SARS, or COVID-19. And national emergencies, of which COVID-19 also provided several examples: the need to develop and roll out a track-and-trace system, mass vaccination centres, ‘pop up’ Nightingale hospitals, and the urgent provision of PPE.
And when such crises do occur, there’s often a need for different government agencies, departments, and commercial partners to work together to achieve complex and challenging logistics objectives. The emergency services working with the military, for instance. Government departments working with the police and other agencies. And—as with COVID-19—different branches of the military working with each other, and with the National Health Service.
The difficulty in all this? Disparate IT systems, disparate coding and classification schemes, and disparate databases—all of which must suddenly and seamlessly work together to create a single supply chain, or successfully achieve a single overarching objective.
In the first installment of the Leidos UK Insights Series, industry experts discuss the challenges involved in doing this, and also— drawing on actual real-life studies—outlines the role that technology can play.
Speakers:
Tim Crofts, Vice President Business Development and Strategy, Leidos UK
Huw Jenkins, Interim Vice President, MD Logistics Division and Programme Director LCST, Leidos UK
Professor Richard Wilding OBE, Professor of Supply Chain Strategy Logistics, Procurement and Supply Chain Management, Cranfield School of Management
James Burman, Editor, SHD Logistics
