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Energy Institute Lecture Series: Dr. Chelsea C. White III

Supply Chain Designs and Strategies for the Future

The next presentation in the Texas A&M Energy Institute Lecture Series, featuring Dr. Chelsea C. White III, is the Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, will be held on Wednesday, September 7, 2022, from 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. CDT (UTC -5:00) in the Frederick E. Giesecke Engineering Research Building (GERB) Third Floor Conference Room and through a Zoom Meeting. The topic will be “Supply Chain Designs and Strategies for the Future.”

Abstract

The impacts on businesses and consumers of disrupted supply chains and the challenges of managing a supply chain impacted by disruptions have become better understood in recent years.  Since the beginning of 2020, and in contrast to prior to 2020, the pandemic, extreme weather, and geopolitical events have created an unusually volatile period of supply chain disruptions that seems unlikely to diminish soon.  In response, supply chain managers continue to move from lean supply chain designs to more costly agile, and hence more resilient, supply chain designs in seeking the best balance between supply chain agility, supply chain risk, and customer service level. 

In this presentation, we will present how supply chains have recently been reconstructed to be more agile and the resulting cost implications.  We then will explore how supply chains can be designed that are both agile and low cost, expanding our scope to include innovation, product design, supply chain ecosystem design, and workforce culture.

Biography

Professor White holds the Schneider National Chair of Transportation and Logistics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is the former Director of the A.P. Sloan Foundation Trucking Industry Program and the former Executive Director of The Logistics Institute. While on the faculty of the University of Michigan, he was the founding Engineering Co-Director of what is now the Tauber Institute for Global Operations.  He was a member of the board of directors of Con-way, Inc., (NYSE: CNW), an American Fortune-500 multinational freight transportation and logistics company, for over 11 years until the acquisition of Conway by XPO. He was on the Board of Advisors for FreightWaves, a futures and options marketplace for transportation capacity, is a former member of the World Economic Forum Trade Facilitation Council, and is a current member of the Board of Directors of the Industry Studies Association.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of INFORMS, and an INFORMS Edelman Laureate. His current research interests include the design and operation of resilient and competitive manufacturing supply chains.