Video Tips – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

Video Tips: How We Use Videos in the New 15th Edition

We are big believers that videos are a valuable teaching and learning tool in our OM and SCM courses. With the newly published 15th edition we offer the following free video features.

New video cases: We provide over fifty 8-12 minute integrated Video Cases to help readers see and understand operations and supply chain management in action within a variety of industries. With this edition, we take you behind the scenes at Oregon State University, which recently rebuilt a major portion of its football stadium and re-envisioned the game day experience for fans. .
These new OSU videos provide an inside look at:
• Project Management in Rebuilding OSU’s Football Stadium (Ch. 3);
• Capacity Planning for Oregon State University’s Football Stadium (Supp. 7);
• Designing a New Stadium Experience at Oregon State University (Ch. 9); and
• Planning for a Home Football Game at Oregon State University (Ch. 15).
In addition, we continue to offer our previous Video Cases that cover: Celebrity Cruises, the Nautique Boat Company, Alaska Airlines, the Orlando Magic basketball team, Frito-Lay, Darden/Red Lobster Restaurants, Hard Rock Cafe, Arnold Palmer Hospital, and Wheeled Coach Ambulances. All of these were filmed by the author team specifically to match the chapters and topics in the text.

New Video Clips: In addition, hundreds of 1-2 minute clips from these videos are now imbedded throughout the interactive digital text to provide students with brief snapshots of the techniques they’re reading about being applied in industry. With a quick click, students can see the immediate topic brought to light.

Excel Spreadsheet Videos: We include “Creating Your Own Excel Spreadsheets” in 12 chapters of the book to illustrate how students can build their own spreadsheets to solve OM problems. We also have videos to accompany these examples.

Solved Problem Videos: There are over 90 solved problems at the end of chapters to help students review models they studied in the text. We have filmed ourselves walking step-by-step through each of these in 5-15 minute videos.

Recent Graduate Videos: Want your students to learn about jobs in OM/SCM? Here are a dozen 4-minute videos filmed by recent grads describing their work in the discipline. Each grad also includes personal tips for landing a job and future success.

To order your desk copy of the 15th edition, just click on the link above.

OM in the News and Video Tip: A Circular Economy Hub for Automaker Stellantis

Stellantis opens its first circular economy hub.

Stellantis–the global automaker with brands including Chrysler, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati and Peugeot– has inaugurated a Circular Economy Hub at its manufacturing complex in Turin, Italy, demonstrating its commitment to a “360-degree approach” to automotive production, involving a strategy of remanufacturing, repair, reuse, and recycling (4R‘s.) Stellantis says it is adopting capabilities and facilities “to change its consumption model to reduce the environmental impact and better manage the company’s aggressive decarbonization target of reaching carbon net zero by 2038.”

“Circular economy,” a topic in Supplement 5 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text, describes an economic concept for production and consumption that preserves the value of energy, materials, and labor as products move from design through to end-of-use handling and recycling. The Hub represents a $40 million investment, covering 785,000 sq. ft. The site will employ 550 workers by 2025.

“The Circular Economy Hub brings together a powerhouse of skills and activities aimed at creating a high-performing center of excellence in Europe,” stated Stellantis in American Machinist (Nov. 28, 2023). “We are industrializing the recovery and sustainable reuse of materials, building new technologies and advanced capabilities as we grow in this area.”

The primary objectives for the Hub are to extend the life of parts and vehicles, ensuring that they last for as long as possible; or, failing that, to recycle those materials and others from end-of-life vehicle dismantling for remanufacturing as new parts and/or vehicles. The goal for the first operation, “Reman,” is to manage over 50,000 remanufactured parts annually by 2025, rising to 150,000 by 2030. For the Hub’s Sorting Center, the target is to process an estimated 2.5 million worn parts annually by 2025, increasing to 8 million by 2030.

The Vehicle Reconditioning activity will undertake aesthetic and/or mechanical repair of remanufactured or used parts and then reintroduce those to the supply chain through Stellantis’ manufacturer-certified used-vehicle program and services network. Last, the Vehicle Dismantling activity will convert end-of-life vehicles into resources for parts to be remanufactured, reused, or recycled.

Stellantis intends for the Hub to generate “efficiencies and synergies” among these activities, and through vertical integration of materials and processes. Here is a 3.5-minute video showing the 4R process in action.

Classroom discussion questions:

What is meant by “circular economy?” Give an example with an iPhone as the product.
What auto parts will be hard to repurpose?

Video Tip: Self-Checkout Lines–Growing or Shrinking?

Is the honeymoon period with the self-checkout register officially over? What once was a convenient alternative, quickly became the only option in many retail stores, as it was sold as an efficient, cost cutting solution meant to move customers in and out of stores quickly.

No doubt the age of the self-checkout register, which began in the 1980’s but exploded in the 2000’s in supermarkets and convenience stores is here to stay. But now even some of the largest retailers are re-evaluating the actual use of them. This includes chains like Booths supermarkets in the United Kingdom as well as Walmart, Wegman’s, Five Below, and Costco in the U.S.

Coping with criticisms from annoyed customers is one key reason. Another one is theft by way of checking oneself out of the store. This is occurring, either directly or indirectly, as thieves know exactly how to use checkouts. For example, Costco had discovered that customers who were not members of the club were using membership cards that were not theirs to ring up their own purchases.

Costing large retailers and small retailers their profits is typically the trigger for stores to change their ways. In the case of the big box stores like Costco, they can absorb the “shrink,” known as the loss of inventory. They still have the bandwidth to figure out a better approach to utilizing self-checkout registers.

A study of stores in the U.S., Britain, and some other European countries, discovered that shops that offered self-checkout suffered a 4% loss, which is more than twice the rate in the retail industry. This type of loss is the reason Booth supermarkets announced “that it is going back to old-fashioned human beings to check people out,” according to CNN Business in this 2.5 minute video. It is also the reason Walmart removed these registers from some stores in New Mexico as well as modified the self-checkout lanes in other stores to accommodate more employee attendees.

Classroom discussion questions:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of retail self-checkout?
How does this differ from self-checkout in restaurants and hotels?

Video Tip: Inside Amazon’s Strategy to Redefine Fast Shipping

In the fiercely competitive retail segment, three factors drive consumer choices: product availability, price and delivery speed. Minor variances in delivery time can considerably sway customer decisions.

Consumers often pay a premium for quicker delivery. This trend is particularly stark in the U.S. Here, e-commerce companies grapple with Amazon’s evolving delivery benchmarks, shifting from 3-day to 2-day, to 1-day and now same-day delivery in many areas. Amazon’s speedy delivery consistently outpaces other retailers, being powered by advanced robotics automation.

But to stay ahead of Target and Walmart, Amazon is overhauling its distribution network. The Wall Street Journal just visited a same-day facility to explore the company’s fast-shipping strategy and produced this excellent 8-minute video that your students will enjoy.

Amazon launched Prime in 2005, with a revolutionary free Two-Day Shipping on 1 million items. Today, Prime has more than 300 million items available with free shipping and tens of millions of the most popular items available with free Same-Day or One-Day Delivery. Across the top 60 largest U.S. metro areas, more than half of Prime member orders arrived the same or next day.

Here is how Amazon did it:

“Regionalizing” U.S. operations network They divided the country into 8 smaller, easier-to-reach regions with a broad selection of inventory in each region, making it faster and less expensive to get those products to customers. Previously, the firm fulfilled orders from operational sites across the country. Over 76% of customer demand is now fulfilled within their region.

Selecting the Right Items Amazon uses increasingly advanced machine learning algorithms to better predict which items customers in various parts of the country will want and when they will want them, and then works with vendors to store those products closer to customers. This helps to ensure that we have the right inventory, in the right places, at the right time. Each same-day facility stores the top 100,000 items sold in the region.

Growing the Same-Day Delivery network Same-Day facilities are smaller buildings situated close to the large metro areas they serve, which decreases the distance to customers. These buildings are designed for speed with smaller footprints, streamlined conveyors, and picking directly to pack stations. As a result, the average time from picking a customer’s items to positioning the customer’s package on the outbound dock is 11 minutes in Same-Day facilities, more than an hour faster than traditional fulfillment centers.

Note that we highlight Amazon’s inventory practices in Chapter 12’s Global Company Profile on pages 490-491.

Video Tip: Designing a Football Helmet for Deaf Players

Gallaudet has a history of technological innovation with wide applications.

Shelby Bean could not help but feel a bit jealous. As a deaf football player for four years at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., he called defensive plays with American Sign Language and dealt with other obstacles hearing opponents never need to worry about. Now an assistant coach, he was on the sideline earlier this season for a milestone at a school accustomed to them: The debut of new technology that allows plays to be displayed visually inside quarterback Brandon Washington’s helmet — a welcomed step that happened to coincide with the team’s first win of the season.

Gallaudet has been trying to level the playing field for the Deaf and hard of hearing community for more than a century, reports USA Today (Oct. 31, 2023). The helmet, developed with AT&T 129 years after quarterback Paul Hubbard invented the football huddle, is just the latest example of how the private university has been an incubator for Deaf technology in use around the world. The technology involved in the helmet could help firefighters, construction workers and first responders in noisy situations while giving the deaf and hard of hearing improved access to jobs and everyday activities.

The helmet tech works with the push of a button on a tablet on the sideline. The play is beamed over 5G to a tiny, nearly transparent screen in the quarterback’s helmet. Experts, advocates and those who worked to create the helmet dream of the day the technology is widespread and mainstream, unlike more elaborate visual headsets like Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens.

Closed captioning is perhaps the most well-known example of a Deaf-led innovation that has found its way into everyday life. Videophones — like the ones that debuted at Gallaudet in 2004 — gave way to FaceTime and similar apps. The hope is the helmet technology is the next one to go big. “It can have so many more benefits outside of the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community that really just makes everyone’s life better,” said Shelby Bean. “There’s no cap to it. This can go anywhere and everywhere.”

Here is a 2-minute video clip on the story.

Classroom discussion questions:

Why is developing new products, the topic of Chapter 5 in your Heizer/Render/Munson text, so difficult?
What are some other applications you can think of for this technology?

Video Tip: Heinz’s Mass Customization of Sauces

For more than 125 years, Heinz bottles have touted “57 varieties,” a number completely made up by its founder with little to no real-life application. Now, Kraft Heinz wants to offer customers more than three times that number of condiment options through a new customizable sauce dispenser, created for food-service clients.

The machine, called the Heinz Remix, is the latest example of Kraft Heinz leaning into its away-from-home segment to grow sales. The company has expanded distribution in airports, launched a deluxe version of its mayonnaise for chefs and reformulated its Lunchables so they can be served in schools.

The company is still working through the specific business model for the Heinz Remix. It’s also looking at how the dispenser could be used for drive-thru orders. The machine requires more time and effort than throwing a handful of ketchup packets in a takeout bag, which will likely pose a challenge for speed-focused drive-thru lanes.

To make a customized sauce, consumers will use the touchscreen to select a base of either ketchup, ranch, 57 Sauce or BBQ sauce; add in “enhancers” that include jalapeno, smoky chipotle, buffalo and mango; and set one of three intensity levels. The mass customization dispenser can make more than 200 condiment condos. (Click here for a 3 minute video on the Remix).

The company created the Heinz Remix in just 6 months, with helping hands from Microsoft, device engineers and internet-of-things developers.

While the Heinz Remix is new, its design feels familiar, thanks to its resemblance to the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine, which was launched nearly 15 years ago. Today, Coke’s touchscreen drink dispensers can be found in more than 50,000 locations, including McDonald’s restaurants, AMC movie theaters and Target stores. Customers’ favorite custom orders from Freestyle machines have inspired the beverage giant to introduce new bottled drinks, such as Sprite Cherry and Coke with Cherry and Vanilla.

Classroom discussion questions:

What does mass customization mean?
Provide other examples of mass customization in service businesses. (Hint: see Chapter 7 in your Heizer/Render/Munson text).

Video Tip: Feeding Delta Airlines’ Passengers

Airlines know passengers aren’t picking flights because they prefer one carrier’s short rib to a rival’s ravioli. And most coach passengers on domestic flights still have to pay if they want more than a small snack, although complimentary meals are available on a handful of the longest cross-country flights.

But food is a key part of the passenger experience, and airlines have been making investments in recent years. That includes partnering with outside chefs, offering more choices and mining data on passengers’ likes and dislikes.

Even with changes, don’t expect Michelin to start awarding stars. Feeding customers at 35,000 feet brings challenges terrestrial restaurants don’t have to deal with.

Dishes need to hold up after being chilled and reheated in flight. Flight attendants, who handle final food prep, are busy and are not chefs. And even gourmet food suffers in flight, where low air pressure and dry air dull flavors.

But let’s take an inside look at how Delta Airlines uses operations management processes to make it work. In this 4 and 1/2-minute video click here we can watch the story as told by The Wall Street Journal on March 31, 2023. We see that at Delta’s largest kitchen facility at its hub in Atlanta, teams must cook, package and transport 3,200 meals a day for the airline’s first-class passengers.

Today’s airline meals, of course, do not compare to the 1950s and 1960s, which was dubbed the “golden age of air travel,” when multi-course meals and alcohol were served on board to economy fliers, as we see in the photo.

Classroom discussion questions:

What technology is Delta employing?
How does it handle scheduling for delivery to flites?
What is the facility’s layout?

Video Tip: Where New Warehouses are Booming–Loop 303

The growing logistics activity comes as many retailers and manufacturers are looking to reconfigure their supply chains, both to get closer to the big U.S. consumer markets and to get around the bottlenecks at traditional freight hubs.

The drive along the 36-mile length of the Loop 303 freeway around Phoenix takes under an hour. The trip goes fast, but not quite as fast as the land along the 303 is being gobbled up by developers and filled with massive manufacturing and logistics facilities. “Developers from all parts of the country have been planting flags in that area. For the most part, that corridor is spoken for,” says one developer.

The rush of activity along the 303 was triggered by a number of factors, chief among them being the rising costs of development in California. Slowly, companies were starting to realize they could build a distribution center or manufacturing plant in the Phoenix area for much less than a facility would cost in the major cities in California. And, the ports of Long Beach and the border with Mexico were within a few hours’ drive by truck.

“The Southwest Valley of Phoenix has always been the industrial and manufacturing corridor,” said an industry VP. “You can get to the ports in six hours, drop your shipment and get back home, all within allowable times.”

This 5-minute Wall Street Journal video (Oct. 12, 2022) takes a close look at one 17-mile stretch of Arizona’s Loop 303 highway where dozens of warehouses are springing up. Importers say regions like this one in Arizona are a good alternative to expensive and heavily-congested hubs like California’s Inland Empire, where space is scarce and comes at premium prices. Click here to watch it.

Classroom discussion questions:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of opening warehouses on Loop 303?
Of the 7 factors that impact location decisions discussed on pages 338-340 (see Chapter 8) in your Heizer/Render/Munson text, which applies here?

Video Tip: The Bullwhip Effect Hits Stores This Season

This could be the year of clearances and deals. Retailers have seen a surge of inventory as they found themselves carrying too much stuff that consumers no longer want so much of, including basic apparel, home appliances and furniture. says The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 5. 2022) in this 4 minute video (click here).

Ahead of last holiday season, retailers ordered with plenty of cushion in mind to prevent empty shelves. Now a bullwhip effect, which we discuss in Supplement 11, could be in store. The latest indication was from Kohl’s which reported that inventory rose 40% compared with a year earlier. Walmart and Target saw inventory swell by 32% and 43%. Off-price retailers Burlington and Ross Stores indicated that they also saw closeout inventory start to skyrocket.

There are broadly two shifts going on that threw a wrench to retailers’ inventory planning. One is a shift from discretionary to essentials, which both Walmart and Target saw. And within discretionary spending, consumers are still spending, but getting pickier with their dollars. Kohl’s, Target and TJX Cos. all said sales in the home category have declined.

Spending instead is shifting to what shoppers need as they go back to the office, attend concerts and travel again such as dressier apparel, makeup and luggage. This isn’t an entirely surprising or alarming picture of consumer health, but low-income consumers clearly are feeling the pinch from inflation, which outpaced wage growth for 5 consecutive months. Walmart, for example, said some consumers are switching from gallons of milk to half gallons. They also are switching away from name brands to private label on categories such as deli and lunch meat.

Retailers with slower inventory turns—such as department stores and apparel sellers—might find current conditions especially difficult to navigate. On average, Macy’s and Kohl’s sold and replaced inventory 3.88 times and 4.34 times, respectively, last year. By contrast, Walmart, Target and off-price retailer TJX all turn over inventory more than 6 times a year.

Retailers were on a high last year when everything—supply chain delays, low inventory, homebound customers and stimulus checks— conspired to feed their bottom lines. A comedown was inevitable.

Classroom discussion questions:

Explain how and why the bullwhip effect takes place.
Inventory turns are illustrated in Example 3 in Chapter 11 (see page 460). What do they mean and why are they an important measure of supply chain performance?

Video Tip: The Automated Warehouse of the Future

It is called “the hive,” or “the grid” — a huge structure that fills a warehouse the size of 7 football fields, and seems to be a huge chessboard populated mostly by robots. There are thousands of them, each the size and shape of a washing machine, and they wheel about, night and day, moving groceries. Their job is to be cheaper and more efficient than humans.

The hive-grid is the creation of Ocado, a British online-only supermarket that’s made a name for itself designing highly automated warehouses and selling the tech to other grocery chains. Ocado’s latest operation processes 3.5 million items or around 65,000 orders every week. It’s an example of the wave of automation hitting countries around the world. The tasks being undertaken by Ocado’s bots are so basic they’re best described by simple verbs — “lifting,” “moving,” “sorting” — and that means they exist in various forms in a range of industries.

Imagine a huge machine, with groceries going in one end and shopping orders coming out the other. Humans do the unpacking and packing, while in the middle, robots sort and rearrange this vast inventory 24 hours a day. Individually, the robots aren’t intelligent; they don’t make decisions for themselves. But their actions are all coordinated by a central computer. This means the robots can be used as efficiently as possible. If you want to pick a typical, 50-item Ocado order, they will help each other. A group of robots can come together in a huddle, split up, and pick that order in a matter of minutes. In a traditional warehouse where items are scattered around on distant shelves, this process can take hours.

Ocado has made deals with supermarket chains in France, Canada, and Sweden to upgrade their warehouses. Such deals should make it easier for these firms to offer online grocery shopping (the UK is a relatively early adopter of this trend) and will help stave off fears of technologically savvy rivals (such as Amazon’s Whole Foods) muscling in on their territory.

Nothing is perfect, of course, and we note that major fires have broken out at Ocado warehouses –the latest this past July when 3 robots crashed into one another.

Nonetheless, your students will enjoy this 3 minute video of one of Ocado’s automated warehouses.

Video Tip: The Chip Shortage –A Look Behind the Scenes

A global chip shortage is affecting how quickly we can drive a car off the lot or buy a new laptop. In this 9 minute video (click the link below), The Wall Street Journal (July 2, 2021) takes us on a visit to a fabrication plant in Singapore to see the complex process of chip making and how one manufacturer is trying to overcome the shortage.

Watch Video Here

How is the shortage impacting the auto industry? Here is one example: Ford Motor Co. said it is forced it to cut output across more than a half-dozen U.S. factories in July, a sign that the supply-chain troubles could take longer to ease than auto-industry executives previously believed.

chip

Ford’s pickup truck factories in Michigan, Kentucky and Missouri will reduce or stop production for much of July, while an Explorer plant in Chicago will be idled for the entire month. Production of several other popular models also will be reduced or scrapped, including the Escape SUV and Mustang sports car.

The Chicago plant and the factories that assemble the pickup trucks—Ford’s biggest moneymaker—had cut production earlier this spring because of the chip shortage. Ford said it is giving priority to the completion of thousands of vehicles that it has assembled in recent months but parked in lots near factories as it awaits needed computer chips. It will continue to build new vehicles, but will curb production so it can move out some of those waylaid models.

Classroom discussion questions:
1. After watching the video, explain why can’t enough chips be produced immediately?

2. How did the auto industry get into this position?

Video Tip: The Automated Sushi Restaurant

Workers are frequently told robots are coming for their jobs, while fast food employees are already starting to see automation creep into their places of employment. Along with kiosks popping up at McDonald’s, diners in Japan have been treated to a sushi-making robot, while in California a robot flips burgers. Chains are thinking more seriously about replacing human staff with technology as a way to combat increased minimum wages and food costs.

Genki Sushi, a Japanese sushi chain expanding throughout Asia, is known for its conveyer belt style of food service, where customers can grab a roll passing by their table. That’s nothing entirely new.

Lately it’s rolled out restaurants in which customers order customized dishes on a tablet. The food is delivered by an automated train which comes straight to the diner’s seat or booth. Upon being seated, everything from sushi to noodle dishes and even cheesecake is delivered by the train. There’s no human involvement at all, even someone to explain the process. Twenty-four sets of tracks crisscross the restaurant, and the train system has the capacity to serve up to 158 patrons at once. When customers are ready to leave, they simply pay for their meal on a self-service machine. They also clear their own tables by simply dropping the plates into a slot that leads to a hidden water-driven conveyor belt.

As we write in Chapter 7 (p.288): “Ultimately, selection of a particular process strategy requires decisions about equipment and technology.” This interesting 3 minute video makes that point to your students.

Video Tip: Global Auto Production by Country

In this animated 6-minute infographic, we see the history of global auto industry competition from 1950 to 2019, spelling out the winners and the losers. As the moving bar graph clocks through the years and nations, we have these observations:

+ In global auto production, Japan surpassed the U.S. in 1975, earlier than many may remember. But, the U.S. retook the number 1 spot in 1995 and held it until 2006, when China swept past both countries to claim the top spot and the U.S. slipped back to second.

+ In 1957, twelve years after the end of World War II, Germany overtook the U.K. for second place, albeit a distant second with 1.5 million vehicles produced versus nearly 8 million for the U.S.

+ China did not enter the top 10 until 1998, but then it quickly leapfrogged through the standings, taking the top slot in 2008 at 12 million units. Today, China is by far the world’s most prolific auto producer with more than 27 million cars, trucks, and buses built in 2019, 2.4 times as many as the U.S., the next largest producer. Note that Mexico is making an impressive rise in recent years.

The major automakers of today are multinational corporations with numerous international joint ventures, so the auto industry of the 21st century is a small, but a complicated world. This is an excellent video to show when discussing Global Operations Strategy Options in Chapter 2 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text.

What patterns can your students point out?

OM in the News and Video Tip: FedEx Recruits Robots

Robotic arms manufactured by Yaskawa America

Sue, Randall, Colin and Bobby are 4 of the most reliable FedEx workers in Memphis. Each clocks 8 hours a day, sorting 1,300 packages an hour. They almost never take breaks, as they are actually 260-pound industrial robot arms.

They work only about half as fast as skilled humans, but they are quickly becoming an important part of the chain that keeps packages flowing. These robots, getting both “eyes” and “brains” that allow them to sense and respond, typify an important and growing trend in automation, writes The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 8-9, 2020). They have cameras which perceive visible light and sensors to perceive depth, and their “brains” are built with machine-learning AI. This gives them a level of adaptability not before seen. (There is an excellent 6 min. video that opens this WSJ article).

But the robots are not about to steal all the jobs in these industries. For now, they’re mostly filling vacancies created by surging demand. The explosion of e-commerce means an explosion in the volume of packages shipped to homes. Some 87 billion parcels were shipped worldwide in 2018—that’s 40 a year to every person in the U.S.—and this volume will more than double by 2025.

The need for social distancing within warehouses means robots can play a role in helping workers do their jobs without being directly adjacent to one another. And logistics companies are still finding it hard to hire people fast enough. (FedEx’s air hub in Memphis currently has 500 job openings). FedEx estimates one human could tend up to 8 robots.

The overwhelming majority of industrial robot arms in the world are still the “dumb” kind: They repeat the same action over and over again—for example welding the same parts together repeatedly on an auto production line. The holy grail of picking technology—a robot that can handle the same variety as a human—will remain out of reach for a long time, in the same way we have yet to create an autonomous vehicle that can handle the same variety of road situations a human can.

Classroom discussion questions:

Why is it so hard for robots to replace warehouse workers?
Why are firms like FedEx more driven to automate?

Video Tip: Demand and Capacity Management in the Air Cargo Industry

The COVID-19 pandemic is a health and humanitarian crisis, and it is also an economic shock, reports Accenture (May 8, 2020). The aviation and air cargo sectors have mobilized in a big way to help supply personal protective equipment (PPE), hand sanitizer, ventilators and other desperately needed items for combating COVID-19. The crisis is shining a light on the importance of logistics and supply chain management for helping save lives, but also for bringing staples and food to populations sheltering in place. Air transport is being heavily relied on because many emergency supplies are located overseas, or across the country, and air is the fastest mode for getting them to where the outbreak is spreading.

This 12 minute video provides a fascinating glimpse how the world’s airlines have had to prepare for shocks in capacity and demand management, the topic of Supplement 7 in your Heizer/Render/Munson text.