Dr. Jennifer Ryan on Studying Supply Chain Management Under Uncertainty

Image by iStock/Andrey David Piza Pulido

In this episode of Lehigh University’s College of Business ilLUminate podcast, host Stephanie Veto talks with Dr. Jennifer Ryan about her interdisciplinary background, her interest in studying supply chains under uncertainty and her course Analytical Approaches to Supply Chain Management.

Dr. Ryan is the new Frank L. Magee professor and department chair for the decision and technology analytics department in the College of Business. Before joining Lehigh, she served as the inaugural department chair for supply chain management and analytics in the College of Business at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Below is an edited excerpt from the conversation. Read the complete podcast transcript [PDF].

Veto: You teach engineering and business. How did you end up combining these two professions? 

Ryan: I've always had sort of an interdisciplinary focus. When I was in college, I studied mathematics and the social sciences. So combining math with social sciences to understand why our systems work the way they work. And then when I went to graduate school, I studied industrial engineering and management science. And so again, from its title, it's just inherently interdisciplinary, right? It combines management, but it also looks at engineering. 

So we've all seen in the past five years that supply chains are so important to business, right, to getting the products or the services where they need to be, to satisfying us as consumers, what we need. So obviously, supply chain is tightly connected with business, but it's also connected to engineering because supply chains are big, complicated systems that need to be managed. And that requires technical expertise. It requires lots of data analysis and quantitative methods that we learn in engineering. 

And so it really is a field that is interdisciplinary by nature. 

Veto: This semester, you're teaching Analytical Approaches to Supply Chain Management. What are some things your students have to look forward to in your course? 

Ryan: The course is really about applying analytics, so data analysis and quantitative tools, to make supply chain decisions. And I think it's a great fit also for Lehigh students. I think they're just such strong students, right, that they won't be afraid of this kind of content. Sometimes this analytical stuff scares people, but I don't think that's the case for Lehigh students. And because the topic of the course really focuses on using analytical methods to solve supply chain problems, we're going to do a lot of hands-on work. 

What I really want to emphasize in the course is that there's no one right solution to a problem, that there can be lots of different solutions. We'll spend a lot of time talking about, what if? What if this changes? How would your solution change? What are the trade-offs involved in making this decision? 

We’ll spend a lot of time thinking about how we are going to communicate our solution to our boss or to our manager. And so I'm going to always be encouraging them to come up with some kind of visual way to represent their solution, whether it's a graph or a picture, to help with the storytelling aspect. 

Veto: Your research interests are in supply chain management under uncertainty. Can you talk about that? 

Ryan: Supply chain management is really fundamentally about trying to make supply match demand, right? And so the challenge we face in supply chains is that both supply and demand tend to be unpredictable. We can think we know what our available product will be, but we could be wrong. We might think we know what consumers are going to want to buy, but we could be wrong. 

And so on the supply side of the supply chain, we've heard in recent years a lot about disruptions to supply. So things like earthquakes or hurricanes that might cause a manufacturing plant to shut down. We've had these big disruptions to supply, but companies also face on a daily basis lots of smaller disruptions to supply. A machine might fail, a worker might just not show up or your supplier might not make that shipment. And so companies on a daily basis have to deal with all kinds of uncertainty.They need to be able to design their supply chains to be resilient and robust and to cope with that kind of uncertainty. 

On the demand side, we've got consumers. People like you and I, we're fickle, right? We change what we want. One day we want to buy blue and the next day we want to buy red. And so companies can do a really good job of predicting what we want, but they can only look so far into the future. There's inherently going to be a lot of uncertainty on the demand side as well. 

It's really important to companies to build these adaptable and agile, flexible supply chains so that they can pivot when consumers pivot. And so what I do basically is trying to come up with ways to help companies address all of those issues. 

Veto: One of your current research projects is about the impact of nonprofit group purchasing organizations on the reliability of drug supply. 

Ryan: The nonprofit GPOs have sort of what I would call a multi-pronged approach that they're trying to take to eliminate drug shortages or reduce drug shortages. And so one thing they're trying to do is to bring new manufacturers into production for these drugs that have been having shortages. What we've seen in the healthcare industry is a lot of consolidation in manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. 

The manufacturers don't really have an incentive to invest any money in improving their processes, having better quality production or having more reliable production. So this nonprofit GPO said that it will give a real commitment. They would not push the price super low. And, if they said they were going to buy a certain amount over the next year or two years or three years, that's what they would buy.

That change to the contract structure gives more of an incentive. It makes it easier for these manufacturers to invest in improving manufacturing. 

Additionally, they're building their own manufacturing facilities here in the US. A lot of pharmaceutical manufacturing has been outsourced outside the US to places where they don't have the same degree of safety standards or quality standards that we might have. Having it domestic improves reliability, but also having those higher quality expectations can also improve reliability of supply. So they're trying to take this multi-pronged approach to addressing some of the reasons why drug shortages occur.