Question: Can you please provide and example discussion questions response for the following?

Topic: Managing the Physical Flow of Supplies and lessons learned during the COVID-19 contigency.

Context: Having the right product at the right place and time at the right cost and quality is one of the biggest challenges an operations and supply chain manager encounters. To successfully meet customer needs, supply chain professionals must accurately forecast and support operational needs. This requires robust forecasting, inventory, and information management capability.

Discussion: Think back to the last time you went to the store or performed an online search for a product you wanted to buy and found either an empty shelf or that the product was no longer available.

Think about how you felt. What did you do? Now you have a better understanding of how a company's customers feel when products are not delivered on time.

Based on your own personal experience or a related Internet search, identify a time when you experienced or witnessed a fulfillment failure. If a personal experience, choose your example so that you can research why it may have occurred if you do not have personal knowledge of the company's supply chain.

Analysis: Assess why it happened.

As you dissect the fulfillment failure, consider how each of the following may have or did contributed to the problem.

• Forecastingthat is, did managers underestimate demand? If so, what went wrong?
• Inventory that is, did decision makers run too lean, leading to a stock out or shortage? If so, what went wrong?
• Information that is, did managers have all the information they needed to make good decisions? If not, why not? What information is accurate and readily available?
• What else might have contributed to the fulfillment?

Application:

*If the experience you are sharing comes from your work experience, please share how you and your company resolved the issue. What did you do to fix the underlying causes in order to make sure your company did not suffer a similar fulfillment failure again?

-OR-

*Either describe what approach the company took to fix the issue (from your research) or discuss what you would advise them to do, so it does not happen again.

NOTE: If you have an example from the pandemic, you still must discuss forecasting, inventory and information. There are many articles on lessons learned from the pandemic that can help you develop your response to fix the failure. These are academic articles, reviews by organizations from the field of supply chain and government institutions.