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Watch for the stampede. It’s coming.

Lots of legislators are kicking around statutory responses to the coronavirus right now, but our community is not waiting.

Steve Geary
By Steve GearyMay 08, 2020
Steve Geary

Steve Geary is adjunct faculty at the University of Tennessee's Haaslam College of Business and is a lecturer at The Gordon Institute at Tufts University. He is the president of the Supply Chain Visions family of companies, consultancies that work across the government sector. Steve is a contributing editor at DC Velocity, and editor-at-large for CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly.

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“Like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the coronavirus pandemic is a world-shattering event whose far-ranging consequences we can only begin to imagine today,” according to Foreign Policy Magazine.

While eloquent, the assertion is misleading. If you are a professional in the supply chain, you began weeks ago. And while you may be accelerating, the vector is obvious.

Last year we were looking for alternative sources of supply offshore to supplant Chinese vendors. The vector was clear. Low cost was the goal, and that meant generally rearranging the deck chairs in Asia.

Supply Chain practitioners are dusting off some old vocabulary. Reshoring. Near-shoring. Onshoring. Resilience. Adaptability. Best value.

Lots of legislators are kicking around statutory responses to the coronavirus right now, but our community is not waiting. Supply chain leaders are already making the shift. We are not beginning to imagine it, as Foreign Policy magazine asserts. We are doing it.

We’re box kickers, and proud of it.

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