Supply chain for Good: Enhancing governmental rapid response logistics with industry spare capacity

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During times of crisis such as the COVID 19 pandemic, the government faces two major challenges with respect to meeting demand for critical supplies such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and test kits. As inventories of such supplies are depleted and demand rises, it becomes essential to make optimal use of resources at the local, regional and federal levels and in the immediate, short and medium time frames. While some distribution channels are overwhelmed with increased demand from online deliveries and suffer serious shortages in capacity, other channels are affected negatively by the pandemic and have idle capacity that can be repurposed to alleviate pressure on existing channels. This applies to the automotive aftermarket distribution network which continues to operate as an essential service but is experiencing significant decrease in demand, and hence offers residual capacity that can be leveraged to help combat the pandemic. The aftermarket supply chain offers efficient and timely delivery capabilities to different regions of the country as well as inventory capacity for safe storage and retrieval. The current project will investigate and optimize the use of the capacity and efficiency of the aftermarket automotive distribution network to optimally enhance the capability of government distribution networks to meet health care and public sector needs for critical supplies. A modeling framework based on state-of-the-art techniques in Operations Research will be developed to integrate multiple supply chain networks to serve a common goal. We call such a framework: Supply Chain for Good. While based on the automotive aftermarket in Canada, the framework will be general and will have the necessary tools and mechanisms to leverage spare capacity in existing supply chain, logistics and distribution networks that become available in times of crisis to help address urgent needs. The framework will have the dual socio-economic benefit of creating economic opportunities for participating supply chains as well as of ensuring critical supplies are available when needed. It has the bigger objective of reducing the immediate and future risk of an aggravated situation, in the case of covid-19, that of the propagation of the disease.