Because time flies, flies time. That’s particularly true of mayflies, whose lives are so short they measure them in hours. Now, we discover in 2020, that supply chains seem to be the new mayflies, well, sort of.
Adult mayflies seem to have a single purpose in their short lives: Make more mayflies. So, they don’t have to worry about eating. Their short lives put them in the order Ephemeroptera, notable here because of the linguistic cognate, ephemeral. They come together mate and make, and then die. The global supply chains are similar, but it took the Covid-19 for many to realize the ephemeral nature of material abundance and easy access to goods.
As Nick Vyas, Executive Director of the Center for Global Supply Chain Management (USC Marshall School of Business) explains, a very complex supply chain has evolved to provide services and products “right away. In this process, we removed access to excess inventory and slack capacity. This phenomenon took away elasticity…[leaving] no room for any disruption… We’ve become dependent on each other’s capacities….”* I suppose one could think of our current circumstance as an analog of modern “print-on-demand” publishing. Amazon, for example, doesn’t keep a supply of its authors’ CreateSpace books. You want one; you get one. No giant warehouse stands idly by filled with thousands of unsold volumes. Like mayfly reproduction, books come and go in a moment, produced on the spot in the short term and only as the driving need for reproducing them arises.
Without the diversification of supply chain “nodes,” people in the second decade of the twenty-first century have become accustomed to the ready resupply process. But when Covid-19 threatened one of the world’s giant suppliers, China, the various nodes of production and transport suffered the interruption. Suddenly, the world became aware of its end-to-end supply chain vulnerability.
Covid-19 has presented businesses with a pause to think about how they operate on a global scale. As they await the restocking of store shelves, individuals pause, also, to think about their own mayfly-like existence.
*University of Southern California. 13 Mar 2020. Five questions on how coronavirus will impact the global supply chain. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-03-coronavirus-impact-global-chain.html Accessed March 14, 2020.
Adult mayflies seem to have a single purpose in their short lives: Make more mayflies. So, they don’t have to worry about eating. Their short lives put them in the order Ephemeroptera, notable here because of the linguistic cognate, ephemeral. They come together mate and make, and then die. The global supply chains are similar, but it took the Covid-19 for many to realize the ephemeral nature of material abundance and easy access to goods.
As Nick Vyas, Executive Director of the Center for Global Supply Chain Management (USC Marshall School of Business) explains, a very complex supply chain has evolved to provide services and products “right away. In this process, we removed access to excess inventory and slack capacity. This phenomenon took away elasticity…[leaving] no room for any disruption… We’ve become dependent on each other’s capacities….”* I suppose one could think of our current circumstance as an analog of modern “print-on-demand” publishing. Amazon, for example, doesn’t keep a supply of its authors’ CreateSpace books. You want one; you get one. No giant warehouse stands idly by filled with thousands of unsold volumes. Like mayfly reproduction, books come and go in a moment, produced on the spot in the short term and only as the driving need for reproducing them arises.
Without the diversification of supply chain “nodes,” people in the second decade of the twenty-first century have become accustomed to the ready resupply process. But when Covid-19 threatened one of the world’s giant suppliers, China, the various nodes of production and transport suffered the interruption. Suddenly, the world became aware of its end-to-end supply chain vulnerability.
Covid-19 has presented businesses with a pause to think about how they operate on a global scale. As they await the restocking of store shelves, individuals pause, also, to think about their own mayfly-like existence.
*University of Southern California. 13 Mar 2020. Five questions on how coronavirus will impact the global supply chain. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-03-coronavirus-impact-global-chain.html Accessed March 14, 2020.
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