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Opportunity came knocking and Colehower joined UST in September 2021 , at a time when , frankly , global supply chains were in a mess . After decades of focus on global sourcing and successfully improvising efficiencies and driving down costs , COVID happened . And that shockwave continues to reverberate . The question is , did we push our luck , and was a shock like this inevitable , and the fallout avoidable ?
“ When I look at the work that we ' ve done in supply chain over the last 20 or 25 years , we ' ve done some really , really good work , and created very lean , efficient supply chains – almost ridiculously efficient . What I don ' t think we really considered along the way was are they resilient ? Can they withstand a shock ?” says Colehower .
“ We became so fascinated with lean Six Sigma black belt , so on and so forth , that we lost sight of the fact that these things could take shocks and what are we going to do when that happens ? I think that the unimaginable happened and the lean supply chains were not able to respond .
“ It worries me , because of all that great work we did , I don ' t want it to go away . I don ' t want manufacturers to overreact and just drop offshore manufacturing and all the great things that we ' ve done to return to domestic manufacturing and building up inventories . I just don ' t think that those are going to be beneficial in the long term .”
Colehower believes that global supply chains will rebound but that executives are going to be looking beyond lean and also demanding resilience . Technology will provide more simulation and game theory to test resiliency , using digital twin tech to model and see what happens “ when you throw a rock at it ”.
And that is often when organisations turn to UST , to solve their most complex problems .
28 March 2022