Dominican professors mapping the road to supply chain recovery

Mohamed Askar believes the world as we knew it is gone forever.

But the longtime Dominican University professor isn’t interested in authoring a postmortem on the world’s economy before the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s instead working alongside his colleagues to identify the road to economic recovery.

During a presentation to the university community earlier this semester, Dominican professors Askar, Anne Drougas and Khalid Razaki analyzed the impact of the pandemic on supply chain management while also detailing several research paths they plan to pursue.

The trio of academics spent the last year pondering the same question countless economic scholars have grappled with: how can the world’s supply chain—and economy—return to normalcy?

The COVID-19 pandemic provided the greatest supply chain disruption ever; one that has had a far-reaching impact on human life, Askar noted.

“Every time I talk to my students, I tell them that you are the first generation who is going to handle the new world order, because the world as we knew it ended in 2020,” Askar said. “It is a new world in the post-covid era.”

To fully understand the characteristics of supply chain recovery, Askar, Drougas and Razaki hope to develop further field studies that link recovery efforts to the degree of supply chain complexity and the level of control that an entity has over its supply chain.

The trio theorizes the complexity of a supply chain relies on several factors, including its span, the number of processes involved, the level of bureaucracy experienced along it and the technical complexity of products produced.

An entity’s control over its supply chain includes its use of sophisticated IT to manage data, degree of collaboration and production flexibility, and its control over logistics providers along the supply chain, they said.

The trio’s research will focus on two areas: factors affecting supply chain recovery and the impact of sustainable supply chain finance practices on supply chain management recovery.

The field of sustainable supply chain finance is one that has yet to be effectively researched, Drougas said.

The term is used to describe a set of technology-based solutions that aim to lower financing costs and improve business efficiency for buyers and sellers linked in a sales transaction, according to Drougas. Sustainability is introduced by offering financial incentives for suppliers that meet certain environmental, social and governance standards, she said.

“What I found exciting after conducting research with (Mohamed) and Khalid is that there are really strong intersections with what we’re studying with some of the things that Dominican is passionate about: sustainability, entrepreneurship, social justice and DEI initiatives,” Drougas said.

The main independent variables Drougas, Askar and Razaki plan to examine when analyzing factors affecting supply chain recovery are the degree of a supply chain’s complexity and the level of control and redundancy across a supply chain.

Prior to outlining research paths, Askar defined a supply chain as a set of three or more entities (organizations or individuals) directly involved in the upstream and downstream flows of products, services, finances and/or information from a source to a customer.

Askar noted that we are currently living in a “transitional economy,” and it will likely take the world “five to 10 years to see what the post-COVID economy will be.”

While identifying the road to supply chain recovery is crucial, the scholars are also studying how the pandemic exposed the weaknesses of producing abroad and how that may inform future production decisions.

“Maybe it’s cheaper to produce in China, but the pandemic taught us that we need to start thinking about proximity and creating excess capacity,” Askar said. “It's going to change the way we manage.”

The ability to respond to change will also be vital moving forward.

“Pre-COVID, we were thinking about efficiency,” Razaki said. “Now, post-COVID, we are thinking about responsiveness and how to be able to respond to changes like (the pandemic).”

“(Supply chain) resilience depends upon what you have in place, and how quickly you can change it,” he added.

Dig deeper into supply chain complexity and control

What factors determine the complexity of a supply chain?

• Number of processes in the supply chain

• Geographical span of the supply chain

• The technical complexity of products produced

• The span of supply chain over various countries and the degree of development of these countries

• The level of bureaucracy experienced along the supply chain

What determines an entity’s control over its supply chain?

• The use of sophisticated IT to manage data across the supply chain

• The degree of collaboration

• Availability of organizational slack and excess capacity along the supply chain

• Degree of production flexibility across the supply chain

• Control over logistics providers across the supply chain