Nearly 130 people attended the 2023 Voorhees Supply Chain Conference, held on October 12 at the Sukup End Zone Club at Jack Trice Stadium. The annual event, now in its 30th year, is hosted by the Ivy College of Business Department of Supply Chain Management.
The conference brought together supply chain researchers and professionals from some of the nation’s leading transportation, manufacturing, and agribusiness companies. This year’s event featured keynotes from three industry leaders.
Yone Dewberry, senior vice president and chief supply chain officer at Land O’Lakes, Inc., talked about building interconnected supply chain networks that can withstand frequent disruptions.
“We’ve gone from supply chain to supply networks,” said Dewberry. “We are now a supply network, where everything is interconnected with everything else, and you just can’t get away from it.”
In this interconnected environment, faced with frequent disruptions, “we need to start to build supply chains that can absorb the shocks, that are built around continuity, not around efficiency,” said Dewberry. “If you’re building your supply chain, it needs to be agile and resilient, not just efficient.”
Swedish entrepreneur Fredrik Svedberg, founder of Logtrade, described the company’s Internet of Logistics, where products can sell and move themselves through data sharing and autonomous, connected supply chains.
“We need to start to build supply chains that can absorb the shocks, that are built around continuity, not around efficiency. If you’re building your supply chain, it needs to be agile and resilient, not just efficient.”
— Yone Dewberry
The final speaker, Eleke Ukpabi (’16 MBA), vice president for solution engineering and strategy at Ruan Transportation Management Systems, focused on the need for organizations to embrace uncertainty and offered a blueprint for building resilient, adaptable supply chains.
After lunch, five Ivy faculty members presented a series of quick research updates. Topics included industry collaboration to reduce “empty miles” on trucks, incentivizing the use of parcel lockers for packages instead of home delivery, a model to rehabilitate locks and dams on the upper Mississippi River waterway, and consumer stockpiling of fresh meat during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Voorhees Supply Chain Conference was established by alumni and friends of Iowa State University to honor the career of the late Professor Emeritus R. Dale Voorhees and to provide industry leaders with a premier conference in their field. Voorhees was an Iowa State teacher and researcher for 20 years. Dale’s daughter, Mary Gretchen (Voorhees) Green, was in attendance and spoke about her father’s legacy at Iowa State University.
The Iowa State University Supply Chain Forum provided additional support for the conference.
October 20, 2023
