Policy Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Food Insecurity in Rural America: Evidence from Appalachia

Rural communities are disproportionally affected by food insecurity, making them vulnerable to the consequences of supply disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. While access to food was initially diminished due to food supply disruptions, little is known about the mechanisms through which federal emergency assistance programs impacted food access in rural populations. Through a series of five focus groups in spring 2021, we examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food access in a rural Appalachian community in Kentucky. Data were analyzed using a Grounded Theory Approach. Findings revealed the following four primary themes: food scarcity in grocery stores; expanded federal food assistance; expanded community food resources; and expanded home gardening. Participants provided details regarding the way increased federal assistance, especially expanded benefits within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, allowed them to purchase greater quantities of nutritious food. This study unveils the specific impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on one rural population, including the influence of some social determinants of health on food insecurity. Policymakers and stakeholders should recognize the layered protection of multiple federal emergency assistance programs against food insecurity and the potential for long-term population health promotion in rural areas.

An Optimized System to Reduce Procurement Risks and Stock-Outs: A Simulation Case Study for a Component Manufacturer

In the current global system; supply chains are at risk due to increasing procurement shortages, supply disruptions, and the reliability of on-time deliveries with the original order quantities. As a result, an anticipated management model is of vital importance to provide companies with the productive flexibility necessary to adapt quickly to supply changes, in order to ensure the quality and delivery time through efficient management of stocks and supply costs. In this context, this research aims to develop a system to complement classical procurement planning based on inventory management methods and MRP (material requirements planning) systems by considering suppliers’ behavior regarding procurement risks. For this purpose, a system is developed that seeks to simulate the impacts of procurement shortages of different natures. Moreover, the research investigates the development of a system that performs procurement planning of a component manufacturer to determine the supply orders necessary to meet the master production schedule. The system is analyzed based on a set of indicators in the event that the supplier of a material needed for production does not supply on time or has short-term problems. Several scenarios are simulated, and the results are quantified by changing the procurement order quantities, which may or may not follow the economic order quantity (EOQ) model, and the potential procurement disruptions or shortages. The results show how the simulation and anticipation of potential suppliers’ procurement behavior concerning potential shortages and their probability are key for successful procurement within a joint strategy with classical procurement methods.

Hold-Up Problems in International Gas Trade: A Case Study

The infrastructure required for international natural gas trade is considerable, which often leads to hold-up problems and supply disruptions. This study discusses disruptions of gas supply from Algeria, Indonesia, Russia, and Turkmenistan since the early 1980s. The novelty of this study is its focus on the issues related to transit countries, which are rarely considered in the literature. The results of the study classify supply disruptions into six types, show the evolution of supply disruptions over time, and discuss mitigation strategies. The six types of disruptions include political change, price demands, debts, technical issues, transit fees, theft of gas. The evolution of the disruptions shows that the issues related to transit countries have become more frequent in the last two decades. Mitigation strategies tailored to transit countries include using an international organisation, designing contracts with price mechanisms that might reduce the possibility of disputes and reducing the number of parties involved in the trade.

An Overview of Indicator Choice and Normalization in Raw Material Supply Risk Assessments

Supply risk assessments are an integral part of raw material criticality assessments frequently used at the country or company level to identify raw materials of concern. However, the indicators used in supply risk assessments to estimate the likelihood of supply disruptions vary substantially. Here, we summarize and evaluate the use of supply risk indicators and their normalization to supply risk scores in 88 methods published until 2020. In total, we find 618 individual applications of supply risk criteria with 98 unique criteria belonging to one of ten indicator categories. The most often used categories of supply risk indicators are concentration, scarcity, and political instability. The most frequently used criteria are the country concentration of production, depletion time of reserves, and geopolitical risk. Indicator measurements and normalizations vary substantially between different methods for the same criterion. Our results can be used for future raw material criticality assessments to screen for suitable supply risk indicators and generally accepted indicator normalizations. We also find a further need for stronger empirical evidence of widely used indicators.

A purchasing portfolio model for humanitarian supply chain resilience: perspectives from a development aid context

PurposeThe impact of supply disruptions from unplanned events can cause goods shortage, limited responsiveness and high opportunity cost thus compromising development aid programmes' achievement targets. These situations force humanitarian aid agencies to develop new strategies for effectively managing their supplies. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the foundation of humanitarian supply chain resilience through the development of an adapted Kraljic portfolio model.Design/methodology/approachAction research was used to adapt and validate the Kraljic portfolio model to the development aid context. The research team worked with a humanitarian aid agency in developing criterions and used Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) in weighting those key criterions.FindingsThe adapted portfolio model was able to evaluate purchases done by the aid agency by incorporating different perspectives related to the strategic importance of purchase and supply vulnerability. In particular, development aid programmes require large supplies annually. Better classification offers improved visualisation of purchases, leading to a more precise adoption of mitigation strategies and policies to minimise supply disruption risks.Research limitations/implicationsAdapting the Kraljic portfolio model is a stepping-stone to building humanitarian supply chain resilience. The proposed humanitarian supply chain resilience framework is based on the foundation that current humanitarian supply chain needs to be re-engineered. In order to re-engineer, the supply base strategy must first be revisited.Practical implicationsMany aid agencies do not have a holistic view on their purchases and commonly apply a transactional classification of purchases that only considers the consumption values. Purchasing strategies mostly focus on cost minimisation, whereas risk mitigations have been disregarded. The proposed portfolio model overcomes these drawbacks. Societal impact may be limited but development aid agencies will be able to offer more reliable aid delivery as part of their mandate.Originality/valueThe proposed portfolio model is among the first tool to guide humanitarian aid agencies to develop procurement strategies to alleviate supply disruptions and increase development aid programmes resilience.

Seasonal Inventory Management Model for Raw Materials in Steel Industry

We developed a seasonal inventory management model for raw materials, such as iron ore and coal, for multiple suppliers and multiple mills. The Nippon Steel Corporation imports more than 100 million tons of raw material annually by vessels from Australia, Brazil, Canada, and other countries. Once these raw materials arrive in Japan, they are transported to domestic mills and stored in yards before being treated in a blast furnace. A critical problem currently facing the industry is the limited capacity of the yards, which leads to high demurrage costs while ships wait for space to open up in the yards before they can unload. To reduce the demurrage costs, the inventory levels of the raw materials must be kept as low as possible. However, inventory levels that are too low may lead to inventory shortage resulting from seasonal supply disruptions (e.g., a cyclone in Australia) that delay the supply of raw materials. Because both excess and depleted inventory levels lead to increased costs, optimal inventory levels must be determined. To solve this problem, we developed an inventory management model that considers variations on the supply side, differences that should be observable upon looking at the ship operations. The concept is to model the probability distribution of ship arrival intervals by brand groups and mills. We divided ship operations into two stages: arrival at all mills (in Japan) and arrival at individual mills. We modeled the former as a nonhomogeneous Poisson process and the latter as a nonhomogeneous Gamma process. Our proposed model enables inventory levels to be reduced by 14% in summer and 6% in winter.

Analysis of an inventory system with emergency ordering option at the time of supply disruption

This paper studies a continuous-review stochastic inventory problem for a firm facing random demand and random supply disruptions. The supplier experiences operational (on) and disrupted (off) periods with exponentially distributed durations. The firm adopts an order-up-to level policy during the on period and additionally can release an emergency order based on the inventory level just before disruption. This inventory policy is described by a continuous-time Markov chain model. We analyze the model for two different lead time scenarios and suggest solution approaches yielding the optimal policy parameters. In a numerical study, we explore the value of exercising such a policy and show that an emergency ordering opportunity at the disruption time brings substantial cost savings in cases with high lost sales cost, long off period, and low percentage of supplier’s availability.