Supply Chain Immunity (eBook)

This book provides a concerted supply chain perspective for dealing with pandemics on the scale of COVID-19.  Specifically, this book describes a new approach, supply chain immunity, to illustrate what is needed to fix our economy and healthcare systems.  The authors of this book are experts in supply chain management, health care supply chains, major systems acquisition, and contingency sourcing methods.  Based on first-hand experiences working during COVID in the depths of the nation's supply chain failures, the authors develop important themes for private and public sector supply chain managers to consider in rebuilding a more immune supply chain.  The book is targeted at policy makers, academics, practitioners, and students of disaster response, public policy, healthcare, and supply chain management who are interested in learning contemporary lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic.  From the perspective of those who lived through the chaos, the authors further explore the application of novel concepts in joint planning, market intelligence, and governance related to a national pandemic or other global contingency. 

Rob Handfield is the Bank of America University Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management at North Carolina State University, and Executive Director of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative. Handfield is considered a thought leader in the field of supply chain management, and is an industry expert in the field of strategic sourcing, supply market intelligence, and supplier development.  He has spoken on these subjects across the globe, including China, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Latin America, India, Europe, Korea, Japan, Canada, in multiple presentations and webinars. Handfield has published more than 120 peer reviewed journal articles and is regularly quoted in global news media such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Bloomberg, NPR, Washington Post, the Financial Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and CNN.  He served on the Joint Acquisition Task Force during COVID which led to published articles on the shortages of PPE in the Harvard Business Review and the Milbank Quarterly Journal, and led a NIIMBL research team studying distribution of test kits during the pandemic.