Video: Business and Supply Chain Strategy in Covid-19 and Beyond

When most of us think about the way Covid-19 has upended our daily lives, much of the focus is on the health care system and the surface level economic impact, like businesses closing. Equally disrupted have been the global economy and global supply chains—the topic of a recent Faculty Forum Online webinar featuring MIT professor Yossi Sheffi PhD ’78.

“You may not have all the parts to build the product you need to build, and you may not have enough product to give to the customers. So how do you prioritize which customers get their orders and how much of the order they get?” asks the Elisha Gray II Professor of Engineering Systems, who is director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics and director and founder of MIT’s Master of Engineering in Logistics Program. In his new book, The New (Ab)Normal: Reshaping Business and Supply Chain Strategy Beyond Covid-19, published in October, Sheffi offers a framework for how to think about these kinds of challenges and how to operationalize solutions.

Sheffi also explores what enterprises are likely to do to survive and thrive after the pandemic subsides. “There’s nothing like crisis to tell you who is a good customer and who is a good supplier and who can work under pressure.”

After his talk, Sheffi took questions from a live alumni audience on topics such as the pandemic’s impact on supply chains in developing nations and the net carbon footprint of Covid in America. 

The talk was moderated by Chelsey Graham, a 2018 alum of the MITx MicroMasters program in Supply Chain Management, research associate at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Watch more archived Faculty Forum Online webinars, and register for upcoming MIT Alumni Association virtual programming.