With vaccination efforts moving along, what is in store for the supply chain?

While the myriad changes that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had on all walks of everyday life, one cannot help but be optimistic about the ramped-up pace of vaccine distribution efforts (for the most part), as the walk to return to a more normal way of life turns into a sprint over the next few months.

But we are not back to a pre-pandemic world, at least not yet. And once everyone who wants a vaccine gets one, that does not, by any stretch, represent some type of magic button that will make all well, nor will it make us all forget just how equal parts challenging, trying, and dire the effects of the pandemic have been on many, both from personal and professional levels.

In order to move forward, though, we always need to look back to the past to see what we have learned. And, in the case of freight transportation, supply chain, and logistics, that is quite a lot. In fact, it is historical on so many levels.

When the pandemic truly kicked in, for many here in the United States, it really came to light on Friday, March 13. Ominous enough for everyone?

Now, I am not going to retrace every single step of what we all were going through and feeling on a personal level, due to word counts and mental bandwidth, but I will say there was a healthy dose of uncertainty flowing. Why wouldn’t there be, right? The world ostensibly shut down. Nobody was leaving their homes, seeing family and friends, or going to work or school. People, of course, went to stores for necessities, but that was really about it.

One thing, of course, that did not shut down were supply chains. Well, we can back up there. There were shutdowns and closures to different degrees, but with so many people stuck at home, they turned to ordering online goods, whether it was food and perishables, as well as a run on home improvement products, with people stuck at home and getting in “fix-it” mode.

Of course, people also continued going to places like supermarkets and grocery stores, albeit very carefully, and we all saw severe shortages for items ranging from toilet paper to poultry products.

One school of thought for these types of shortages was that people were overbuying goods, or hoarding, as a matter of necessity, and another school of thought was that it was a “supply chain problem,” which was creating these issues. We can all have our own opinions on whether it was one or the other (or possibly something else), but I am willing to bet it was a little bit of everything.

Once the shock of the pandemic worked off, e-commerce took off to levels we have never seen before, where they still largely remain, too. Again, nothing new there but worth the observation. This massive increase of online ordering subsequently strained delivery networks to never before seen levels, with many industry observers calling it a new peak season on top of the traditional holiday rush. In other words, it became peak season all the time. Delivery network providers UPS and FedEx raise rates, known as peak surcharges, as they struggled to keep up with demand, and, in some cases, had to tell some retailers they were capping the amount of volume they could deliver through their respective networks, which led to late deliveries and confusion for some consumers. And don’t forget the many ships berthed outside West Coast ports waiting to be unloaded and restock inventories depleted by the pandemic.

So, we all know what happened. Now we turn to what may happen next, once we are all vaccinated and return to doing things we have not done in a long time, like going to movies, concerts, sporting events, and many other things that involve crowds and lots of people.

It goes without saying there is a healthy amount of pent-up demand for these things. I know I can vouch for that on a personal level. How will supply chains react once this happens? What will happen to freight flows? Most industry experts I have posed this question to have said it remains too early to tell, given the still-intact levels of uncertainty that the pandemic has brought.

No matter what happens, one thing that has been made clear over the last year and change is that the links of the supply chain are connected to literally everyone in some way, shape, or form. Many times, it seems like the supply chain is in the news for the wrong reasons, when things go wrong. But the pandemic also has highlighted how important it is and the important role it plays in keeping global and domestic economies moving in the right direction. That is something we can all applaud.