Overview
Background:
Major disruptive changes are occurring across the Globe, causing severe disruptions in Trade, Supply chains, Logistics and Operations management across all industries worldwide, starting with the 2019 Pandemic and continuing in both variety and severity. These occurrences have changed the world-trade landscape and are promising to extend into the foreseeable future, creating new unfavorable norms and difficult realities world-wide.
A sampling of these Post-Pandemic occurrences are:
- COVID Pandemic itself;
- lock-downs,
- travel restrictions,
- vaccine programs,
- emergency medical reactions,
- healthcare systems capacity,
- healthcare compensation schemes,
- stimulus programs/funds, inflation,
- Economic sanctions,
- Trade wars between major economies
- Resistance to Petro-Dollar-based trade,
- BRICS trade block
- Crypto-currencies proliferation
- Advent of Digital Currencies
- Interest rate manipulations,
- currency exchange rates manipulations,
- Red Sea Crisis
- Panama Canal crisis
- Black Sea crisis
- Geo-political maneuvering,
- China’s Road & Belt initiative
- Cold wars, trade barriers, arms races, etc.
- Armed conflict, mass destruction, infrastructure destruction, workforce depletion, etc
- Civil wars, coups/revolts in Critical Resource areas
- Labor-force trends such as remote work, quiet quitting, new ethos, etc.
- Labor Union disputes, work stoppages, higher costs of wages, benefits, working conditions, etc.
- Green energy pushing/imposing
- Rare-earth elements difficulties/monopolies
- Artificial intelligence emergence
- And much more to come…
Your assignment:
Conduct an in-depth investigation, among peer-reviewed sources, highly credible News sources, Trade Journals, magazines and other sources for the industry and products of your MBA major area of study (MARKETING). The purposes of this investigation are;
- To explore the effects of these disruptive changes on the specific aspects of operations named below.
- To discover how the businesses within that industry have done to cope with these disruptions and mitigate the negative impact in those aspects.
- To formulate recommendations for the industry to change their current practices / state of affairs in order to cope in the future, where these disruptions and difficult realities become the new norms, and continue to worsen as time goes on. Describe how future practices, norms and state of affairs must become to successfully navigate the new unfavorable conditions, so that the industry may successfully survive and thrive.
It is recommended that you use Artificial Intelligence in gathering the significant information needed for items 1 & 2 above. Item 3, the formulation of your recommendations, however, must be the work of your team based on the information gathered.
Aspects of Operations to investigate are:
The impact that the "Pandemic Era" had on OUTGOING LOGISTICS / DISTRIBUTION for the products of the industry that you chose for your MBA major.
Investigate impacts on at least the following aspects of Outgoing Logistics/Distribution, explaining how occurrences caused the impact, how business reacted/responded to mitigate the impact and your recommendations as to what else they need to do to prepare for the new paradigm of continuous disruption and surprises::
- Transactions
- Order entry
- Trade Terms
- Logistics Terms
- Banking Terms
- Commercial Documentation
- Risk Management
- Resilience
- Risk Management
- New tendencies, approaches, perspectives, etc
- Obstacles to change and ways to get around them
- Forecasting
- Networking & information flow
- Alternate routings
- Ability to react to surprises
- Financial impacts of resilience
- Provisions for fast delivery, reduced lead-time, overnight, same day deliveries, etc.
Produce a Business Report with your findings and your recommendations for the industry.
See "how to write a Business Report"