Solving America’s Tylenol Shortage Problem
Meet the Experts
Key Takeaways
⇨ For critical supply chains, like healthcare, which define the fundamental quality of living of a prosperous nation, the U.S government can help health care deal with such issues.
⇨ As businesses, healthcare companies, are consistently under pressure to avoid excess inventory and waste in their supply chain. It is the concept of this lean inventory management practice that leads to shortages in times of sudden spikes of demand. While lack of product on shelves for some spikes like toilet papers is manageable, medicines are a different category altogether. And this is where there needs to be a sub-policy under the national supply chain policy. This is where learnings from the pandemic experience, beyond the toilet paper shortages, need to be leveraged.
⇨ A simple series of steps can be leveraged to build a process that can help address these issues.
When supply chains were disrupted due to SARS epidemic in China, almost two decades ago, there was a lot of buzz around supply chain resiliency and agility. Companies promised leveraging digital tools and technologies to “transform” their supply chains. Technology evolved exponentially in the next two decades. Organizations had access to tools and technologies that, when implemented properly, could help them build supply chain resiliency and agility. In this article, we discuss how U.S government can help build supply chain resiliency for healthcare supply chains.
