Teaching supply chain risk management in the COVID‐19 Age: A review and classroom exercise

Abstract

The COVID‐19 pandemic has undoubtedly affected every corner of the world in 2020. It has also emphasized the importance of managing supply chain risk and developing an agile supply chain. Supply chain management instructors will likely want to introduce risk management concepts and strategies into their courses to raise their students' sensitivity to the impact of supply chain disruptions. Unfortunately there is currently a dearth of coverage of supply chain disruptions and risk management in the major supply chain management text books as well as in the broader library of supply chain management pedagogical research publications. To help to close this gap in the literature for instructors, we have developed a reading and set of related discussion questions and exercises that detail the causes of the shortage in toilet paper during the pandemic and short‐ and long‐term strategies to make the supply chain more resilient in the future. By focusing on a disruption students likely experienced first‐hand, they can develop a more nuanced understanding of the complexity and interconnectedness of supply chain functions in providing products and services to customers.

Risk management has always been an important concept within the supply chain. As firms began to collaborate and work more closely with their suppliers and customers in the 1990s, they realized significant cost reductions through strategies such as single‐sourcing, low‐cost offshoring, and centralized inventory management. While these cost reductions are hard to ignore, the strategies that enabled them increased the vulnerability of the supply chain to various sources of disruption (Chopra & Sodhi, 2014). More specifically, traditional supply chain planning processes seek to align functions within an organization and those of its major suppliers and customers to reduce costs and working capital requirements through the decrease of inventory and capacity buffers. These buffers are seemingly redundant after the reduction of demand and supply uncertainty realized through collaboration and integrated planning. This planning strategy works well in “business‐as‐usual” environments but not necessarily as well in scenarios that do not materialize according to plan (Trepte et al., 2020).

The spread of the COVID‐19 pandemic throughout the world starting in late 2019 and continuing through 2020 has brought the issue of supply chain risk and resilience into the forefront of the minds of practitioners, academics, and the general public in a way that it never has been before. At first glance, it might seem to be inexcusable that so many supply chain experts were caught unprepared to deal with the pandemic since researchers (e.g., Jüttner, 2005; Tang, 2006) have long emphasized the negative impacts of supply chain disruptions. Firms around the world have dealt with significant supply chain disruptions due to causes such as factory fires costing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and lost production (Mangan & Lalwani, 2016), product recalls of 21 million products due to a foreign supplier using lead paint (Mangan & Lalwani, 2016), cybersecurity breaches costing an average of $6 or $7 million per incident (McCrea, 2019), and natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis resulting in approximately 35% of the affected companies going out of business within 3 years (McCrea, 2019). Many companies even have experience within the past 20 years responding to the outbreak of diseases such as SARS in Canada and many Asian countries and foot‐and‐mouth disease in the United Kingdom (Jüttner, 2005). What about the COVID‐19 pandemic instead has disrupted supply chains so extensively compared to past events?

Moritz (2020) identifies several important characteristics of the COVID‐19 crisis that distinguishes it from other common supply chain disruptions. Most supply chain disruptions are relatively localized in their impact, extending at most through one region of the world. The COVID‐19 pandemic, on the other hand, has spread through and affected the entire world, save perhaps the most remote locales. While many professionals have experience in responding to localized disruptions, the last global disruption even approaching the scale of COVID‐19 was the Spanish Flu of 1918. The COVID‐19 pandemic is also relatively unique in that it has greatly affected the demand for products in addition to disrupting supply. More common natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and tsunamis tend to impact the supply of certain materials, parts, and finished goods. The COVID‐19 pandemic has certainly affected the supply of these items as well when manufacturing plants have been forced to shut down for several weeks or months, but it has also affected demand since many retail stores, restaurants, and other service providers were forced to close operations for similar lengths of time. The uncertainty related to the length and extent of the pandemic is also different from other disruptions that have a significant impact for a shorter, more estimable time period. This uncertainty has also helped to generate fear in consumers, which has led to panic buying of necessities and postponement of some large purchases in favor of boosting household savings balances.

Researchers and practitioners agree that the “old” way of managing the supply chain must be updated in the aftermath of the COVID‐19 pandemic to develop a more resilient network to handle future disruptions (Anbumozhi et al., 2020; Rennie, 2020; Winn, 2019). Supply chain professionals will have to be careful to avoid letting their guard down if they are not affected by major disruptions for a long period of time, as many appear to have done in the decade of growth and prosperity since the 2008 recession (Sengupta, 2020).

One way to ensure that professionals recognize the importance of supply chain risk management and resilience is to include coverage of the concepts and tools within the higher education supply chain management curriculum. The supply chain is so vast, however, that many supply chain educators may not be well equipped to incorporate robust presentations about supply chain risk and resilience into their courses because the topic lies outside of their research background and functional expertise.

The COVID‐19 pandemic also presents an opportunity for supply chain educators to motivate new students to recognize the importance of the supply chain in their lives and hopefully to convince more students to enter the field upon graduation. Professionals and academics have been lamenting the talent gap within the supply chain management field for at least 20 years and have tried to address it in numerous ways, but a significant gap still exists between professional job opportunities within the supply chain and available candidates with the requisite skills to fill those positions (Walden, 2020). The importance of a properly functioning supply chain (and even more significant, the frustration with an ineffective supply chain) has never been appreciated more by the general public than it has during the COVID‐19 pandemic when nightly newscasts and countless social media posts depicted seemingly endless empty aisles at grocery stores. Linking supply chain concepts and strategies to students’ recent experiences will likely entice some of them to think more seriously about choosing the field as a major or minor program of study.

This article is designed to review the existing literature on teaching supply chain risk management and then provide some classroom materials and suggestions that faculty members can use to introduce their students to supply chain risk management concepts through the prism of the COVID‐19 pandemic and relate the issues to other, more familiar supply chain topics within the course or the curriculum as a whole.

1. LITERATURE REVIEW ON TEACHING SUPPLY CHAIN RISK MANAGEMENT

Given the emphasis on supply chain risk management and resilience in the academic and practitioner literature published in the past 30 years, it is surprising to note the dearth of research that has addressed the concepts and tools within a pedagogical context. Very few published articles have focused primarily on the teaching of supply chain risk management. Samaddar and Nargundkar (2010) developed an approach to teaching supply chain risk management using a decision analysis framework (i.e., payoff tables and decision trees). Faced with a real supply chain disruption scenario, students must propose, evaluate, and recommend risk mitigation alternatives using various risk profiles and managerial objectives. Neidigh and Langella (2020) discussed the use of a mixed‐integer programming model to design an optimal supply chain network consisting of supply locations, distribution centers, and demand locations. After solving the model to determine the optimal network structure and conducting a sensitivity analysis on that network by changing various model parameters, students then modify the model to consider the scenario where one of the facilities in the network is disrupted by going offline for a period of time. DuHadway and Dreyfus (2017) detailed a Sales and Operations Planning simulation that includes the random occurrence of significant positive or negative events in each period whose probability of occurrence is based on the students’ decisions within the simulation with respect to supplier and equipment selection. These activities and approaches do cover the issue of supply chain risk management, but that coverage is from a relatively narrow context or perspective such as within a very specific decision environment.

In addition to these three articles, other published supply chain games, simulations, and in‐class activities address the issue of supply chain disruptions and risk to some degree. Snider and Southin (2016) presented an introductory operations and supply chain management exercise to introduce students to many topics that would be covered in the rest of the course, including risk management. In the activity debrief, students are asked to identify potential sources of legal, financial, organizational, and technical risks that the company in the activity might face. This helps to raise students’ sensitivity to potential sources of risk, but (as is appropriate for an introductory activity) it does not go further to discuss the implications of the risks or ways to mitigate the risks. Drake and Mawhinney (2007) developed a multiechelon supply chain simulation exercise that includes the possibility of students’ production and ordering decisions being subject to such disruptions as transportation delays and quality uncertainty. Webb et al. (2014) also discussed a multiechelon supply chain exercise that incorporates production quality uncertainty and short disruptions of product and material flow. While these exercises do incorporate (largely short‐term) supply chain disruptions to some degree, they mainly succeed in raising students’ awareness of possible disruptions and the impacts of those disruptions rather than teaching them how to prevent disruptions from occurring or how to build resilience into the supply chain to handle such situations should they occur.

2. THE CURRENT STATE OF RISK MANAGEMENT WITHIN THE SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT CURRICULUM

Faced with this relative lack of pedagogical literature on supply chain risk management, instructors may naturally turn to popular textbooks as a source of classroom content and fodder for discussion. We examined 14 of the standard introductory operations and supply chain management textbooks at both the undergraduate and graduate levels that have been published since 2016 and evaluated the amount of content on supply chain risk management they contained. Specifically, we looked at two aspects of each textbook: (1) whether or not it had a dedicated chapter on supply chain risk and resilience and (2) the number of pages of content devoted to supply chain risk management and supply chain disruptions according to the book's index. The results of this investigation are summarized in Table 1.

TABLE 1.

Summary of operations and supply chain management textbook coverage of supply chain risk management content

This article is being made freely available through PubMed Central as part of the COVID-19 public health emergency response. It can be used for unrestricted research re-use and analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source, for the duration of the public health emergency.

These results show that these major textbooks taken as a group have very little coverage of supply chain risk management concepts and strategies. Only one book (Mangan & Lalwani, 2016) had a dedicated chapter on the topic, and this particular book is not likely to be assigned in an introductory operations and supply chain management course because it mainly focuses on international logistics. Only two other books in the list had more than 12 pages, with five having fewer than six pages of coverage. The books with more pages covering supply chain risk management were those having a global focus (i.e., Mangan & Lalwani, 2016; Sanders, 2018) or those primarily targeted toward graduate students (i.e., Chopra, 2019). While it is possible that issues related to risk management and disruptions are woven into the discussion in other parts of the books and just did not make it into the index, it is reasonable to assume that any such references are relatively minor and insignificant.

Going beyond the examination of common textbooks, several studies of operations and supply chain management curricula have benchmarked course syllabi with respect to their coverage of particular topics, tools, and skills. Johnson and Pyke (2000) organized common supply chain topics taught in supply chain management courses into 12 categories, but none of these categories was explicitly related to risk management or supply chain disruptions. Even the description of categories such as “location,” “sourcing and supplier management,” “outsourcing and strategic alliances,” and “global issues,” which are at least tangentially related to risk management, included no mention of risk or disruptions. Subsequent studies that have reviewed course descriptions and syllabi (Lutz and Birou, 2013; Onar et al., 2013; Lutz et al., 2014) or pedagogical literature (Visich & Khumawala, 2006; Gravier & Farris, 2008) related to supply chain management or one of its constituent business functions also contain little if any explicit discussion of managing supply chain risks or disruptions in the list of common topics or skills addressed.

In addition to reviewing course descriptions and syllabi, several other studies have combed through thousands of supply chain job postings to identify skills and supply chain knowledge areas that were in demand by employers. Sinha et al. (2016) reviewed job postings from all levels from internships to director‐level positions, while Sodhi et al. (2008) focused on jobs appropriate for MBA‐level graduates. Neither study found risk management or associated knowledge areas as significant keywords in the job postings they reviewed. This may be somewhat understandable in the study by Sinha et al. (2016), which considered a range of job types including internships and entry‐level positions. These lower‐level jobs are traditionally more operationally oriented; as a result, they may be expected to focus on day‐to‐day knowledge and skills rather than those with more of a strategic focus like risk management. It is somewhat surprising, however, that the more senior‐level job postings reviewed in both studies did not identify risk management as a core knowledge area.

Both of these studies compared the job posting results with a sample of supply chain management course syllabi. While Sodhi et al. (2008) did not identify coverage of risk management in the syllabi they reviewed, Sinha et al. (2016) found coverage of “supply chain uncertainty/risk management” on 44.8% of the supply chain management course syllabi in their study. As a result, they classified supply chain risk management as a topic that is potentially overemphasized in academic courses compared to the demand for those competencies in practice since it did not appear in any job postings within their study. If this study were conducted in 2020 and beyond, however, it stands to reason that these results may be different considering the importance of managing risk in the supply chain that the COVID‐19 pandemic has highlighted. It is possible, though, that Sinha et al.’s (2016) conclusion about the overemphasis of risk management was never truly the case in practice. Eight years earlier, Sodhi et al. (2008) interviewed practitioners within the context of their study and found that the practitioners identified a need to address risk management within academic programs to adequately prepare MBA graduates for the field. The disparity between the two studies may likely be the result of an overabundance of entry‐level job postings reviewed in the study by Sinha et al. (2016), a possibility that the authors themselves discussed.

One final article in the supply chain management pedagogical literature addressed the topic of teaching supply chain risk management, but only in passing. Kodzi (2019) described the structure of a supply chain management course for students majoring in international business and mentioned risk management as an element of several modules of the course such as supply chain design and sourcing and supplier relationships. Coverage of these topics was accomplished through a textbook, popular case studies, current trade publications and industry news, and additional books such as Travels of a T‐Shirt in the Global Economy (Rivoli, 2014) and The Sushi Economy (Issenberg, 2008). This approach exemplifies the challenge that instructors face when trying to introduce supply chain risk management concepts in the classroom. They often must cobble together material from a variety of disparate sources as Kodzi (2019) described. The classroom materials that we describe in the next section are designed to fill the gap in published pedagogical materials covering supply chain risk management.

3. SUPPLY CHAIN RISK MANAGEMENT CLASSROOM MATERIALS

To assist instructors in incorporating supply chain risk management concepts into their courses, we have developed a detailed discussion of the COVID‐19 pandemic's impact on the supply chain, which is provided in a supplemental file available on the journal's website. This discussion focuses on the widespread shortage of toilet paper in the United States that occurred in the spring of 2020. Designed as a document for students to read in preparation for a class discussion, these materials discuss the structure of the toilet paper supply chain, the demand‐ and supply‐related reasons for the toilet paper shortage, and short‐ and long‐term actions that members of the supply chain have taken to resolve the existing disruption and improve their resilience to future disruptions. An optional 45‐minute YouTube presentation of the concepts discussed in the reading is also available for instructors’ use at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1PX6G84qVM&feature=youtu.be. In the next section we provide some sample discussion questions that instructors could use to facilitate a class discussion based on the reading.

We created these materials not only to discuss the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic but also to connect these impacts to other traditional operations and supply chain management concepts and topics such as inventory management, the bullwhip effect, capacity management, procurement, lean manufacturing, cross docking, and delayed differentiation. As a result, this reading and the resulting class discussion could be incorporated into courses in several ways. It could be used at the beginning of an introductory operations and supply chain management course to motivate the importance of the supply chain and the supply chain's overall structure. On the other hand, the materials could be used at the end of a course to illustrate the interconnectedness of supply chain functions and the potential breakdowns that can occur due to a lack of coordination and misaligned incentives. The materials would also be appropriate for a strategic or advanced supply chain management course that covers risk and resilience to provide an in‐depth example of the need for proactive risk management plans and strategies.

From a classroom operational perspective, we recommend that students read the material in the supplemental file before coming to class. During class, the instructor can then facilitate a discussion of the situation using the sample discussion questions provided in the next section. This discussion can last for however long the instructor desires and the students remain engaged, in practice anywhere from 20 minutes to 1 hour. Instructors who cannot sacrifice class time for a live discussion could ask students to reply to the discussion questions on a forum or discussion board in the learning management system. They could also ask students to write a reflection about the reading that addresses one or more of the discussion questions or relates their own experiences during the pandemic to the material presented in reading. One final possibility would be for instructors to use the reading as a springboard to a student research project where the students must research supply chain impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic (or other disruptions) on other companies or industries. We purposely prepared the materials in the supplemental file to provide a self‐contained discussion of the scenario to make them useful for instructors in a wide variety of academic settings and formats.

Instructors could also use the toilet paper supply chain scenario described in the reading to create in‐class example problems, homework problems, or exam problems related to inventory management. For example, instructors could ask students to think about their own purchasing behavior and how they determine their order quantities and reorder points for household products. Then they could change the parameters such as adding lead time or supply uncertainty to ask students to think about how they would change their behavior. Instructors could also formulate the decision of purchasing new machinery or building a new paper mill as a newsvendor problem and require that students determine that a high profit margin per unit and a high probability of permanent lost sales would be required to justify the addition of significant capacity.

4. POTENTIAL DISCUSSION QUESTIONS AND SAMPLE ANSWERS

In this section, we provide some potential discussion questions (along with sample answers) that instructors can use to facilitate a live classroom discussion or design an assignment based on the reading in the supplemental file. We have organized these questions to correspond to the section of the reading in which they are applicable.

4.1. Introduction

• Question 1:

  Did you experience stockouts during the COVID‐19 pandemic? If so, what products were affected, and why do you believe those products were out‐of‐stock?

This question is meant to introduce the topic and set the scene of buying items during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Moreover, it exposes to some of the supply chain topics discussed in this article. For example, if a student experienced stockouts of hand sanitizer and soap, hopefully he or she could identify that this was due to the store's lack of inventory to meet all of the demand and the manufacturer's inability to get inventory to the store on time. The instructor could draw the connection between the supply chain concepts of safety stock and lead time that have been (or will be) discussed in other parts of the course.

• Question 2:

  Can you define a lean supply chain? What are some key characteristics of a lean supply chain?

The reading discusses some of the limitations of a lean supply chain. If students are struggling to define a lean supply chain, the instructor can start by asking for key characteristics of a lean supply chain such as waste reduction (particularly in the form of inventory and lead time reduction) and utilizing pull‐based (or Kanban) replenishment. Using the characteristics that students mentioned, the instructor can create an encompassing definition such as “a supply chain that reduces or removes nonvalue‐added activities by reducing wastes (e.g., motion, inventory, waiting, defects, overproduction, transportation, and overprocessing.”

4.2. The toilet paper supply chain

• Question 3:

  After learning a little bit about the toilet paper supply chain, do you see any limitations that could have led to the shortages or inhibited recovery from the shortages?

This question allows students to brainstorm topics that were further explored later in the reading. If students are struggling to come up with ideas, instructors could try incorporating the key characteristics discussed in Question 2. For example, if inventory reduction was a key characteristic mentioned, instructors could lead students to draw the connection that if the toilet paper supply chain has minimal inventory, it can be hard to recover from a large spike in demand like the one seen during the pandemic. The following list includes other possible issues that students could raise when answering this question:

• Manufacturers produce other products in same the plant and have a large variety of products and packaging sizes, which creates additional set‐up time and lowers utilization.

• Expensive paper‐making machines make it difficult for manufacturers to add extra capacity when more product needs to be produced.

• Running at a high capacity utilization leaves little room to increase utilization without maintenance issues arising.

• Manufacturers send products to retail distribution centers, creating longer lead times for retail stores.

• Minimal inventory in the supply chain means there is little safety stock to cover spikes in demand.

• Question 4:

  How can a company make its supply chain more efficient? How does a company increase utilization? How can a company reduce inventory levels through lean practices?

This question allows students to utilize the limitations discussed in Question 3 and brainstorm solutions to resolve them. If students are struggling to answer, instructors could provide common supply solutions like reducing product variation through delayed differentiation and have students match the solution to the previously discussed limitation. The following list provides some sample recommendations that students could develop when answering this question:

• Reduce set‐up times and increase utilization by altering the manufacturing schedule and limiting the variety of products produced.

• Implement and train employees so they can spot maintenance issues early and schedule regular maintenance checks to continue running at high utilization.

• Reduce lead time by delivering products directly to retailers and bypassing retail distribution centers.

• Implement just‐in‐time strategies to minimize inventory while also meeting demand.

4.3. What happened to the U.S. toilet paper supply chain in 2020?

• Question 5:

  The reading mentions how the middle of the supply chain is affected by the first and last links of the supply chain. What affects the first and last links (i.e., the raw material supplier and end‐users) of supply chains?

This question ensures that students see the importance of each link of a supply chain and their influence on the whole supply chain. Raw material suppliers could be affected by limited supply due to natural disasters or trade conflicts or by the closure of a plant due to financial instability or the loss of essential workers. Consumers could be affected by the cost of the product, product promotions, or product availability. Instructors could also use this discussion to explore the topic of bottlenecks, where a supply chain is only as efficient as its weakest link (i.e., the bottleneck). This discussion can also be utilized to discuss pros and cons of domestic versus international or single versus dual sourcing.

4.4. Demand side: Consumer buying behavior given higher uncertainty of stocking levels

• Question 6:

  Consider your own warehousing limitations, demand rate per period, and lead time related to your own purchase and usage of toilet paper. What is your typical reorder point for toilet paper? Did your reorder point change in the beginning of 2020 due to the COVID‐19 pandemic? If so, what was your new reorder point, and how much extra safety stock did you carry?

This question allows students to relate the equations for the reorder point discussed in the reading to their own experiences. Students should be able to explain their assumptions for the demand rate and the replenishment lead time. Then they can use the reorder point equations to determine their ordering policies.

For example, a student may say that she lives in a small apartment with minimal storage space, so she cannot store more than one four‐pack of toilet paper in a closet and another four‐pack in the bathroom cabinet under the sink. Her demand rate may be two rolls per week because she typically buys two four‐packs of toilet paper each month. This equates to a demand rate of 2/168 = .0119 rolls per hour. Her replenishment lead time could be 1 hour because it takes her 30 minutes to drive to and from a store as well as 30 minutes to shop. She would not normally keep any safety stock because the demand rate and lead time are constant. Therefore, the normal reorder point would be .0119 rolls per hour × 1 hour of lead time = .0119 rolls.

At the beginning of 2020, however, the student may have noticed some shortages in the toilet paper supply and decided to purchase one extra four‐pack of toilet paper when one was available. She could have folded some towels differently in the closet to make room to store the extra toilet paper. This additional four‐pack became her safety stock because she never wanted her supply to fall below these four rolls in case the store had another stockout. Thus, her new reorder point would be 4.0119 rolls.

Of course, students’ individual parameter assumptions for demand rate, storage space, and lead time will vary. Regardless of the individual parameters used, however, their analysis will confirm the rationality of customers who increased their purchases of toilet paper above their typical quantities during the pandemic due to the uncertainty of supply availability.

4.5. Supply side: Why were manufacturers and retail stores not able to react quickly?

• Question 7: Can you think of additional reasons why there was a shortage in the supply of raw materials for toilet paper during the COVID‐19 pandemic?

The reading presented a couple of reasons (i.e., decrease in demand for construction and closure of some lumber mills) for the shortage of supply. This question allows students to brainstorm other effects on the supply chain during the pandemic while revealing the complexity of the shortages. For example, the beginning of the reading mentioned that some of the supply was coming from Latin America and therefore being imported to the United States. During the pandemic, imports were often held at docks longer and limited to reduce the spread of the Coronavirus. This would have increased lead times and reduced the supply of raw materials.

• Question 8:

  The reading says, “Using the Newsvendor Model, it can be concluded that a very high profit margin for the product along with a very high probability of permanent lost sales would be required to justify the addition of so much capacity.” Using the $300 million cost of the machinery and $0 salvage value given in the reading, use the newsvendor model to confirm this conclusion.

The underage cost in the Newsvendor Model refers to the lost profit from unfulfilled demand if the capacity was not added. Suppose this lost profit is $1 million. The overage cost would be the $300 million cost to add the capacity since the machinery was assumed to have no salvage value. The resulting critical ratio is 1/(300 + 1) = .0033, which means that it is not optimal to add very much capacity. For manufacturers to add enough capacity to satisfy even the average amount of excess demand, the marginal profit would have to be at least $300 million, which is not likely to be reasonable for a low‐profit product such as toilet paper.

4.6. Short‐term solutions

• Question 9:

  What are additional short‐term actions that you noticed or would have implemented if you were the manufacturer or retailer in the toilet paper supply chain?

The reading provides some examples of short‐term manufacturer and retailer solutions such as reducing variety of products produced, reducing lead time, eliminating online orders, and establishing maximum quantity policies. Students may have experienced additional changes to their shopping experience, heard of changes in manufacturing plants to meet the spike in demand during the pandemic, or have ideas of their own about how they would have handled the shortages in the short‐term. The following list provides some additional recommendations that students could suggest:

• Manufacturers cut some supply to online retailers to focus on physical retail stores.

• Other manufacturers or paper mills that typically produce other paper products start making toilet paper.

• Manufacturers assign each paper mill a specific paper product to reduce set‐up time and increase utilization.

• Retailers maintain consistent communication with consumers and provide data transparency about toilet paper shipments.

4.7. Resiliency considerations and longer‐term adjustments

• Question 10:

  What would a Digital Supply Network (DSN) look like for the toilet paper industry? What kind of technology is needed?

Students should identify functional silos within the toilet paper industry and the technologies they have used or heard of that could help digitally connect these silos. Sample functional silos are transportation, warehousing, customer service, and marketing. Sample technologies are Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics.

• Question 11:

  Do you know of any industries that are implementing the tools you suggested in Question 10? If so, which industries and which technologies are they implementing?

The reading references Kimberly‐Clark Australia's strategy for a more resilient supply chain by focusing on agility and investing in better technologies to have more comprehensive and accurate data faster. The reading also discusses Deloitte's insight on the transition from linear supply chains to DSNs. Students in previous work experiences, school organizations, or other areas may have heard of companies implementing these or similar strategies. This discussion allows students to recall and reflect on industry insights where they have previous knowledge.

For example, a student may have worked for a company in the manufacturing industry that used Salesforce to serve customers. This platform is a strategy to move toward a DSN because the company is hoping to use this data and make it available across their functional business silos and supply chain. This strategy promotes resiliency because it opens communication across the company and supply chain so that changes can be made faster in case of a random spike or dip in demand.

5. CLASSROOM EXPERIENCES AND ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING OBJECTIVES

We pilot‐tested this exercise in two different courses in the Fall 2020 semester. The first course was an MBA‐level survey course introducing supply chain and operations management topics and concepts to the students. For many of the students, this course was their first formal exposure to the supply chain management field. The second course was an undergraduate‐level course in Global Transportation & Logistics, typically taken by students in their junior or senior years. All of the students in this course were either majoring or minoring in supply chain management, and they had previously taken at least three semester‐long classes in supply chain management.

As both of these courses were taught entirely online due to the lingering effects of the COVID‐19 pandemic, we implemented the exercise in the same way across both courses. We assigned the students to read the materials in the supplemental file outside of class and answer several of the discussion questions provided above within a discussion board in the course's learning management system. Then in a subsequent synchronous online session, we invited students to share their responses to the questions as well as their personal experiences during the pandemic.

The students’ written and oral responses to the discussion questions showed that they were able to connect their own experiences during the pandemic to the global issue of supply shortages for essential items. The responses also suggested that the students understood the interrelated factors that led to and exacerbated the supply chain's failure to match demand with supply for these items. The students were able to identify and discuss the challenges that toilet paper manufacturers faced in meeting the sudden increase in demand quantity and variability, and they proposed many short‐ and long‐term strategies that manufacturers could use to mitigate these risks in the future. This was an especially encouraging result from the MBA course since most of those students had no prior academic exposure to supply chain management. This exercise helped to solidify their understanding of core supply chain concepts by connecting these broader concepts to their practical experiences during the pandemic.

We also administered a brief survey to the students in both courses after completing this exercise. The student responses were coded as “Strongly Agree” = 5, “Agree” = 4, “Neither Agree Nor Disagree” = 3, “Disagree” = 2, and “Strongly Disagree” = 1. The results of this survey are summarized in Table 2.

TABLE 2.

Results of postexercise student survey average responses for each question by course

Question	Undergraduate (N = 15)	Graduate (N = 18)
This activity helped me to understand the underlying causes of the shortage of toilet paper during the COVID‐19 pandemic.	4.93	4.61
This activity provided a practical illustration of ways that supply chain functions and members are interconnected and depend on each other to meet the overall goal of satisfying the end customer.	4.60	4.44
After completing this activity, I have a greater appreciation of the importance of supply chain management in fulfilling consumers’ requirements.	4.67	4.44
This activity should continue to be used in this course to introduce supply chain principles and concepts.	4.67	4.50
I enjoyed completing this activity and thought it was a useful learning exercise.	4.40	4.22

This article is being made freely available through PubMed Central as part of the COVID-19 public health emergency response. It can be used for unrestricted research re-use and analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source, for the duration of the public health emergency.

The students’ responses to the exercise were overwhelmingly positive. The survey questions showed that they thought the exercise gave them a better understanding of the importance of the supply chain overall as well as how the constituent supply chain functions are interconnected and work together to meet customer requirements. They also felt that the exercise provided an interesting introduction to the supply chain field and should continue to be used in future sections of these courses.

The survey also asked the students to provide any open‐ended comments about the exercise. Many students reported that the exercise increased their interest in the supply chain management field because it provided a practical example of the way the supply chain affects people's lives. One undergraduate student in particular noted that she worked in a grocery store during the pandemic and the exercise helped her to make a connection about why she experienced all the stockouts and panic buying in her store. Several students also noted that they appreciated how the reading blended conceptual material from the course with the real‐world application and impact of the pandemic‐induced shortages of toilet paper. These students said they felt more confident that they understood how to help companies reduce the negative impacts of these supply chain disruptions in the future.

6. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH

The COVID‐19 pandemic has undoubtedly impacted the entire world and has thrust the importance of an effective yet resilient supply chain into the perspective of the general public. Supply chain risk management has now become an essential topic for supply chain management courses if for no other reason than to ensure that students are aware of the potential consequences of a significant supply chain disruption. Based on the current state of the literature on supply chain management pedagogy and the coverage in mainstream textbooks, however, instructors may have difficulty incorporating risk management concepts into their courses. We have developed the classroom materials and approaches discussed in this article to aid their efforts in connecting these risk management concepts to traditional operations and supply chain topics. These classroom materials can also help supply chain management courses and academic programs to use the experience of the pandemic to motivate students’ appreciation for and interest in the field.

We hope that instructors find the materials that we have developed useful in introducing these supply chain risk management concepts to their students; however, the gap in the pedagogical literature and lack of textbook coverage we found when preparing this manuscript was particularly enlightening as well. Given the importance of emphasizing risk management concepts and tools in supply chain courses, we hope that this article will also galvanize pedagogical researchers to develop innovative methods to teach supply chain risk management and textbook authors to include more coverage of these topics in their revised editions. Preparing the next generation of supply chain management professionals to adequately manage risks and to build resilient supply chains will help to reduce the impact of future supply chain disruptions on the people who rely on those products and services.

Supporting information

Supplementary Material

Biographies

Mark Ferguson is a senior associate dean for Academics and Research, Distinguished Business Foundation Fellow Professor, and Chair of Management Science in the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Ferguson's research interests involve many areas of supply chain management including supply chain design for sustainable operations, contracts that improve overall supply chain efficiency, pricing and revenue management, and the operations/marketing interface. His 2012 paper on the environmental impact of product leasing won the best operations management paper award for papers published between 2012 and 2014 in Management Science. Another two of his papers have won best paper awards from the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), and three of his research projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation. He is the coauthor of Segmentation, Revenue Management, and Pricing Analytics and Pricing Segmentation and Analytics; and he is coeditor of Closed Loop Supply Chains: New Developments to Improve the Sustainability of Business Practices.

Matthew Drake is an associate professor of supply chain management in the Palumbo‐Donahue School of Business at Duquesne University. He was the editor‐in‐chief of Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education from November 2016 until June 2020, and he is currently an associate editor for INFORMS Transactions on Education. Dr. Drake's research interests are in supply chain management education and the design of incentives to improve supply chain performance. He has published over 20 articles in journals such as European Journal of Operational Research, Omega, International Journal of Production Economics, Naval Research Logistics, OR Spectrum, Business Horizons, Journal of Business Ethics, Science and Engineering Ethics, and INFORMS Transactions on Education. He is the author of Global Supply Chain Management published by Business Expert Press as well as the editor of two books of business analytics teaching cases published by Pearson/FT Press.

Ferguson ME, Drake MJ. Teaching supply chain risk management in the COVID‐19 Age: A review and classroom exercise. Decis Sci J Innov Educ. 2021;19:5–14. 10.1111/dsji.12230