From the Director's desk April 2022

Welcome to the first edition of Supply Chain Link for 2022. It was a bit of a slow start here at the Business School thanks to Omicron headwinds. I suspect the same holds true for many of you?

First up, I am very pleased to welcome Dr Aadhaar Chaturvedi as our Deputy Director of CSCM. Aadhaar joined the Business School in 2020 as a Senior Lecturer of Operations and Supply Chain Management. Before coming to Auckland, he taught in both Belgium and India. His research looks at sourcing and designing procurement auctions and he has consulted with both the public and private sectors in Europe and India. You will be seeing and hearing a lot more from Aadhaar going forward.

In this edition, David Robb, consultant and professor at the Business School gives a clarion call for supply chain resilience. His article gives us insights into the vulnerability of New Zealand supply chains and how critical it is to improve their resilience. He suggests some practical and affordable ideas for improvement, including metrics, inventories, capacity, facilities, systems and technology, and people.

With a similar theme, Associate Professor Fernando Oliveira, helps us understand what is happening in the oil market now with the war in Ukraine and embargoes on Russia. He also critically analyses the role of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve which, according to emerging news, are being increasingly tapped by the US to control rising petrol prices.

Next, we have Mahsa Boroushaki, at the end of her PhD journey, who introduces her research on Credence Attribute(CA) agricultural products such as fairtrade, eco-friendly, or organic produce. She investigates the roles of key players in the farm-to-table supply chain and makes recommendations on how to promote CA products. We also have Xiao Li, starting her PhD journey, who talks about her research proposal on the role of crowdsourcing in managing disasters.

We have a report of the first Women in Supply Chain (WISC) event in 2022 in which Louise Wood, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Sanford Fisheries and one of WISC’s founders, interviewed Lindsay Haselhurst, Chief Supply Chain officer at Currys in the UK. Lindsay described her professional journey and her first-hand management experience in managing a supply chain through the pandemic, Brexit and the Ukraine war.

I hope to see many of you online, 12pm, Tuesday 3 May for our CSCM seminar with Thomas Choi about supply chain financing. Invites have already been sent out but please feel free to make contact if you can’t locate it. I wish you all the best in 2022.