Seeing from the eyes of a Supply Chain Management

After the class discussion on “Dabbawallahs of Mumbai”, I am having hard time not thinking about the supply chain process in every product that is coming across my eyes. It made sense after reading the article,  “How to Set the World on Fire: The Logistics of Torching a Marathon”^[1], how supply chain is relevant in everything that you see, feel and speculate.

It was quite intriguing on how Mary Hazen has reasoned out how relevant Supply Chain and in particular logistics is to successful glowing of the torch in Olympics.

There is lot of pride that goes into hosting Olympics and flaming torch represents everything that Olympics is. Passing of the torch by individuals of different countries, color and culture represent today’s world of supply chain where different countries collaborate for the product manufactured to be successful.

For a laymen to understand how important it is to have a back up system to reach to the end of the distribution process during unforeseeable failures, Mary relates it to the incident that happened during 1976, when a rain put out the flame and how an official used a lighter to put on the flame before it is replaced from the backup torch.

The responsibility to deliver the product is so high that any company’s modes of transportation of the goods should be given utmost importance. The dabbawallahs of Mumbai that we discussed in class makes a good example how important it is to maintain the perfect Supply Chain.

Sources:

[1]http://bx.businessweek.com/supply-chain-performance/view?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ctsi-global.com%2FpressRelease.aspx%3Fprid=120%26pid=4%26spid=22