Things that caught my eye:
The 2020 INFORMS Analytics Conference is FREE and online! This is a great opportunity to see some cool talks from your sofa! Here is the LINK!
Marty Lariviere at Kellogg is back writing on Operations Room. Marty’s blog was an inspiration for my own writing as well. Marty is not on twitter (smart man!) but I wanted to link to his article on how some firms expanded capacity for N95 mask production (an inspirational tale) and the benefits from capacity pooling of ICUs in France. (Alas! The US health care system is too fragmented despite all consolidation to pool capacities).
My long time friend and professor at Santa Clara, Ram Bala, did some great work helping match PPEs from their sources to demand through Getusppe.org (Get us PPE). Ram is a thoughtful person and a great writer. He wrote about Blitzscaling and Last Mile Deliveries during COVID-19 on Medium. Well worth your time!
Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer-prize winning writer of The Emperor of Maladies and The Gene, talked about Medical supply chains for the New Yorker (likely paywall), and talked to David Simchi-Levi at MIT about Time to recovery and Supply Chain Resilience. Mukherjee also cites the Toyota study by Toshihiro Nishiguchi-sensei (“Such is the fragility of JIT: a surprise event can paralyze entire networks and even industries”) whom I had the honor of meeting on my last trip to Japan.
Colleagues Tinglong Dai (Johns Hopkins) and Sridhar Tayur at Carnegie Mellon spoke to Ashley Kilgore on the impact of supply chain interruptions during the pandemic. Tinglong is an academic sibling from my PhD program and Sridhar is always a lot of fun to listen to.