Supply Chain Thinking amid the COVID-19 Outbreak: Lessons from Beer Game

Authors

• CHEN Fangruo, Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China

Keywords

COVID-19 epidemic; public health crisis; prevention and containment; economic redevelopment; Beer Game; supply chain management

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak starting at the end of 2019 has turned into a huge public health crisis, with deep and long-lasting social-economic impact on China and around the world. Regrettably, such terrible events are no longer happening once in a century, but perhaps once in a decade or even sooner. Therefore, how to effectively deal with a large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease is an important and urgent question facing the world. The COVID-19 outbreak is both an unfortunate event and a great opportunity for learning. The arduous process of prevention and containment, with countless difficulties throughout, suggests that most of the problems are in fact a supply-and-demand problem, with a dysfunctional supply chain as the ultimate culprit. Drawing on the main principles of modern supply chain management theory, this article makes a number of suggestions for improving the prevention-and-containment process in the future, such as establishing a country-wide monitoring system for contagious diseases, maintaining national strategic safety inventories of key medical supplies, creating a national command center for emergency response and management, etc. On the other hand, as we continue to deal with the COVID-19, more and more attention will undoubtedly turn to economic re-development. By again relying on supply chain thinking, this article attempts to provide a unique angle for understanding the epidemic's impact on industries, with suggestions for companies that are in the process of re-starting production.

First page

289

Last Page

296

Language

Chinese

Publisher

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

References

Chen F, Samroengraja R. The Stationary Beer Game. Production and Operations Management, 2000, (9):19-30.

Lee H L, Padmanabhan P, Whang S. Information Distortion in a Supply Chain:The Bullwhip Effect. Management Science, 1997, 43:546-558.

Chen F. Information Sharing and Supply Chain Coordination//de Kok A G, Graves S C, Eds. The Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science (Vol. 11): Supply Chain Management: Design, Coordination, and Operation. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2003.

Chen F. Decentralized supply chains subject to information delays. Management Science, 1999, 45:1076-1090.

Recommended Citation

Fangruo, CHEN (2020) "Supply Chain Thinking amid the COVID-19 Outbreak: Lessons from Beer Game," Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version): Vol. 35 : Iss. 3 , Article 8.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.16418/j.issn.1000-3045.20200221001
Available at: https://bulletinofcas.researchcommons.org/journal/vol35/iss3/8