When it comes to supply chain and, in particular, the Waffle House Index in the wake of a natural disasters, the name of Panos Kouvelis comes up.
Kouvelis, the director of the Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation at Olin Business School, is an expert in many areas surrounding supply chain.
Prior to joining Olin, Kouvelis served as an associate professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published three books and over 80 papers in top-quality academic journals. Kouvelis has held visiting appointments with the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, where he taught in the executive programs in Barcelona, Chicago and Singapore, WHU- Koblenz School of Management, Germany, and Singapore Management University, Singapore. He has consulted with and/or taught executive programs for Emerson, IBM, Dell Computers, Boeing, Hanes, Duke Hospital, Solutia, Express Scripts, Spartech, MEMC, Ingram Micro, Smurfit Stone, Reckitt & Colman, and Bunge on supply chain, operations strategy, inventory management, lean manufacturing, operations scheduling and manufacturing system design issues.
Panos Kouvelis, of Olin Business School, writes an op-ed in the Houston Business Journal examining the economic ripple effect that hurricanes Harvey and Irma will have on moving goods and supplies around the world. His op-ed also is featured on WashU Perspectives.
The devastating collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore will add another wrinkle to recent global supply chain troubles, according to Olin Business School’s Panos Kouvelis, a global supply chain expert.
Panos Kouvelis, at Olin Business School, is the 2022 recipient of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society’s Distinguished Fellow Award, widely regarded as the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a research scholar in the field of operations management.
Panos Kouvelis, director of The Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation, said, optimistically, supply chains could recover by next summer. But if the energy crisis in China doesn’t resolve quickly, “2022 will be driven by that crisis and the constraints that it creates.”
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.
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.
Panos Kouvelis, who teaches and helped to popularize the Waffle House Index regarding natural-disaster responses, says the outbreak’s impact on global supply chains promises to be two times worse than when the SARS virus emerged in 2002 in China.
Researchers from Olin Business School explore the complexity of tariffs as a trade tool in a global economy in a new paper. The research also establishes a supply chain model to explain those effects. The model proposes that, in some cases, the effects were foreseeable when accounting for strategic multi-party interactions and competition.
The Waffle House index refers to a clue into the level of devastation wrought by a natural disaster — disasters like Hurricane Florence, which made landfall at Wrightsville Beach, N.C., early Sept. 14. Panos Kouvelis, director of the Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation at Olin Business School, has taught it for years.
Consumers can pretty easily discern how automobile manufacturers and their suppliers make money, for example. But fewer understand how their $20 co-pay for anti-cholesterol medication gets split between the drugmaker, the insurance company and the pharmacy benefit manager. New research from Olin Business School aims to explain.
When disasters occur, we are all emotionally affected. But much of the work of rebuilding, in cities large and small, will fall squarely on the shoulders of an often unrecognized party: the supply chain manager. In today’s tightly connected supply chain, a localized disaster — regardless of where it takes place — can have global implications. It is no exaggeration to say that, in the weeks and months to come, the whole world will feel their after-effects.
