Business & Entrepreneurship

Research provides blueprint for development of sustainable milk production supply chain, where milk waste is reduced in a way that is cost-effective, socially acceptable and environmentally sound.

In a business famed for slow and patient aging, it’s been a meteoric rise. Just six years ago, former WashU roommates David Mandell and Daniel Linde stood on a rolling cornfield at the eastern edge of Bardstown, Kentucky. Today, the 100-acre site is home to their Bardstown Bourbon Company, already one of the world’s largest bourbon distilleries.

Panos Kouvelis, director of The Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation and the Emerson Distinguished Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, has been appointed editor-in-chief of Foundations and Trends in Technology, Information and Operations Management.

Resilience, once a hallmark that academics ascribed to the most successful supply chains, has become a “matter of survival,” writes an international team of researchers including an Olin Business School expert from Washington University in St. Louis.

The cold, hard fact is: Pfizer blazed a trail in creating a touted COVID-19 vaccine, but now it must help to equally pioneer an unprecedented way to distribute the drug across the United States and the globe, says a supply chain expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Academics who assembled at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis offered such relevant presentations, research and ideas — a full nine months before a pandemic derailed, if not stymied, global operations — that it produced a special edition in scholarship: how to pay for production and distribution today and manage global risks in a highly uncertain environment. Supply Chain Finance and Fin Tech Innovations was published Oct. 1 as the 14th volume of Foundations and Trends in Technology, Information and Operations Management.

Xiumin Martin from the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis was among four researchers who crunched data to find that personal connections between suppliers and vendors particularly improves the efficiency of the supply chain. To be precise, such rapport results in better overall performance, less restrictive and longer-lasting contract terms, and crystallized communication.

In the future, a global pandemic such as the magnitude of COVID-19 will not only be a foreseeable event, but also will likely change how companies model and mitigate future risks to their supply chains, says an expert on supply chain management at Washington University’s Olin Business School.

The $2 trillion plan to prop up a pandemic-reeling United States, amid the news that there were 3.3 million unemployment claims lodged in the previous week, is expected to pass the House on March 27. An array of Washington University in St. Louis experts offer perspectives on the plan.

Olin Business School faculty at Washington University in St. Louis offer perspectives on the economic, financial and everyday business reactions to the novel coronavirus outbreak.