MT237 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection Example

Forty-One Hours Without the Data Link: A Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on Why I Stopped Wanting a Second Provider

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT237: Supply Chain Systems

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Prairie Rise Desk Co., the outage and every count are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

What Happened

Last January, the translation service that carries Prairie Rise Desk Co.'s electronic documents to and from the office retailer failed for forty-one hours, from a Monday afternoon to early Wednesday morning. Nobody at Prairie Rise noticed until Tuesday afternoon, when the warehouse supervisor asked why there were so few retailer orders to pick in the middle of the peak.

The damage spread in both directions. Upstream, the retailer kept selling during the outage, because its website still showed the morning stock count, and [221] orders queued in the service, unseen by Prairie Rise. Downstream, ship notices for orders already sent did not reach the retailer, so its system treated those orders as late. When the link came back, the 221 orders arrived at once, the warehouse could not ship them all that day, and the retailer's automatic rules canceled [58] orders that missed their ship deadline. Even the lift-column order for the next container went out two days late, because the planning system used retailer orders to forecast column needs and saw almost none for two days.

Where I Started

Before the session, my answer was redundancy. If one provider can fail for forty-one hours, I reasoned, Prairie Rise should pay for a second one, about [$9,000] a year, and switch automatically if the first goes down.

What Changed My Mind

One question from the front of the room reframed the problem. How much of the damage came from the outage itself, and how much from not knowing about it for almost a day? A classmate who works in a distribution center answered that her company's worst losses during system failures came from the hours before anyone noticed, not from the failure.

I went back through the timeline. If someone had noticed within three hours on Monday, Prairie Rise could have downloaded orders from the retailer's supplier portal, which the retailer offers as a backup, and uploaded ship notices as a spreadsheet. Those manual steps are slow, but they would have kept orders moving. Most of the 58 cancellations happened because orders waited a day and a half to be seen.

Sheffi and Rice (2005) distinguish redundancy, keeping spare capacity or backup suppliers, from flexibility, the ability to respond quickly with what you have. A second provider is redundancy, and it would have helped. But a simple alert when no documents arrive for three hours during business hours, plus a written fallback procedure, is flexibility, and it would have cost almost nothing.

The link failed on Monday; the real damage started when nobody noticed until Tuesday.

Why Redundancy Felt Right

Looking back, I chose a second provider because it matched how I think about physical supply: if one supplier can fail, buy from two. But a data link is different from a steel supplier. When steel stops, the warehouse notices within hours because the line runs out. When documents stop, nothing looks wrong; the warehouse simply has less to do, and on a slow afternoon that feels like good news. The failure was silent, so the first need is a way to make it loud. I also realized that a second provider would bring its own risk: two connections to keep in sync, and a switchover that could itself send duplicate orders.

The Wider Lesson

Christopher and Peck (2004) argue that resilience depends on visibility across the chain and a culture that watches for early signs of trouble. Prairie Rise had neither for its data link. Its staff watched trucks, stock and the kitting line closely, but nobody watched the flow of documents because it usually worked.

Hendricks and Singhal (2005) tracked public companies after they disclosed supply chain problems and saw their share performance lag for years, which suggests the costs of disruption go well beyond the immediate losses. For a private company like Prairie Rise, the equivalent is the retailer's supplier scorecard, which counted every one of the 58 cancellations and moved its desks lower on the website for the next quarter.

What I Would Do Now

I would recommend three steps before considering a second provider. First, set an alert that notifies the operations coordinator if no documents arrive from the retailer for three straight hours during the working day. Second, write a one-page fallback procedure for downloading orders from the retailer's portal and uploading ship notices manually, and practice it once before each January. Third, make the column forecast use Prairie Rise's own sales history as well as retailer orders, so a gap in one feed does not distort the next container. If an outage still causes cancellations after those steps, a second provider becomes worth its cost.

References

Christopher, M., & Peck, H. (2004). Building the resilient supply chain. The International Journal of Logistics Management, 15(2), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1108/09574090410700275

Hendricks, K. B., & Singhal, V. R. (2005). An empirical analysis of the effect of supply chain disruptions on long-run stock price performance and equity risk of the firm. Production and Operations Management, 14(1), 35-52. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1937-5956.2005.tb00008.x

Sheffi, Y., & Rice, J. B., Jr. (2005). A supply chain view of the resilient enterprise. MIT Sloan Management Review, 47(1), 41-48.