HKUST Business School Magazine

Biz@HKUST 44 // Cover // Insight Global organizations must rethink supply chain management to cope with the aggravated supply chain challenges resulting from the pandemic Reference Gartner (2019). Future of Supply Chain: Reshaping the Profession. Gartner (2020). Weathering the Supply Chain Storm Survey. SKUs on average, depending upon local customer demand. As one can imagine, monitoring the demand patterns of all of the SKUs of a retail giant like Walmart is a formidable task, as the behavior of a SKU is dynamic rather than static much of the time, and perhaps even more so during a pandemic. As the largest retailer in the world, Walmart receives more than one million transactions per hour from customers. Being able to capture, store, aggregate and analyze data so that the information quickly becomes intelligence is crucial, as the ability for managers to make decisions, not just optimal but also timely, for product assortments and inventories is key to the competitiveness of Walmart. I anticipate big data analytics will remain essential for a company like Walmart to find out whether the changes of customer behavior that take place during a pandemic are temporary or permanent. Conclusion The past few years have seen some of the worst market disruptions in decades. No organization is exempt, and whether one can remain on the right path must always be questioned. The views I offer in this article point to the importance of having proactive mechanisms in place in supply chains. This way, global supply chains will not become completely paralyzed during turbulent times.