2020 was the year everybody learned what a supply chain is. The first lesson came in the form of a toilet paper shortage in the earliest days of the pandemic. The most important lesson came nine months later when a caravan of tractor trailers pulled out of a Pfizer plant in Portage, Michigan, carrying the initial doses of a coronavirus vaccine—each preserved at -70 degrees Celsius —to 636 different locations across the country.

“If supply chain folks do their job right, the non-supply chain folks won't need to know anything about what we do,” says Andrew Kelley, III (MBA 2002), the chief commercial officer for BoxLock. He’s spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to do things right in the midst of a pandemic. Atlanta-based BoxLock began as a B2C company determined to thwart porch pirates with an easy-to-use digital lock, but the company soon expanded its focus to B2B sales in the health care sector. Its clients now include sites responsible for COVID-19 testing and vaccine distribution, which require both security and a reliable audit log.

The supply chain is only working if the vaccine makes it all the way from the manufacturer to each individual, Kelley says. “They need to be sure 100 percent of the vaccines are administered to the community in the right way.” —April White

The COVID-19 vaccines currently on the market went from concept to approval in record time. Is setting up a supply chain to distribute them in that same compressed period also a feat?

It’s been a pretty heroic undertaking. Beginning in Q2 2020, some of the smartest people on the planet have been working on this, first for personal protective equipment and now for the vaccine. At its most basic, creating a supply chain is connecting different pools of information. They had to create a new network, from the truck manufacturers to the freezer manufacturers to the pharmacies.

What was the state of the US logistics sector as vaccine distribution began in December?

We were pretty close to capacity—simply the number of trucks available—even before the pandemic. That got even tighter this year and when you add the holiday season and the vaccine, it’s a three-layer cake of nasty. The one silver lining is that air passenger travel is way down and some of those planes were converted into cargo carriers. That’s a way for airlines to make a little bit of money and also to alleviate the difficulty of transporting things from point A to point B quickly.

How have the country’s existing supply chains affected distribution?

In the United States, freight arteries roughly overlay the interstates. Seventy to 80 percent of products in the country move around by truck, and trucks go where the people are—the East Coast, California, Dallas, Chicago, Denver. Because of that, my expectation is that vaccines will probably flow most easily to population centers—think NFL-sized cities—and then sort of trickle into the rural areas.

Is there any precedent for the logistical demands of this moment?

On a smaller scale, you can look to the holiday season. There’s always a lot of stuff to ship and a deadline for arrival. It happens every year, and it’s been getting worse and worse as e-commerce has increased. The postal service, UPS, FedEx, they all plan for “shipageddon,” as people call it.

Then there’s stuff you can’t plan for, [such as] safety recalls. Tylenol was the famous case. All those pills had to come off the shelves around the country and get returned to the manufacturer quickly. That’s reverse logistics, of course, but you can learn a lot from those examples.

What lessons can we take from the myriad supply-chain challenges of 2020?

The resilience-versus-cost trade-off is going to be heavily scrutinized. A resilient supply chain has redundant systems but that comes at a price not every company is willing to pay. But now we’ve seen the importance of things like dual sourcing and long-lead-time planning so that there isn’t a big backlog for things like tractor trailers. We also need to address the persistent long-haul driver shortage in the United States.

The other thing that will change is inventory; inventory is really the tail that wags the logistics dog. This is why we see distribution centers encroaching on population centers, getting closer and closer to the point of consumption. The more time and money you spend on transportation, the less you have for everything else. That’s money you could be spending to make a product better, faster, cheaper, and safer.

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