Seminar title: 

The New Supply Chain Renaissance

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Abstract: 

The recent pandemic, leading to massive supply chain disruption and now the challenges for vaccine production and distribution, has created the urgency for renewed improvements in the global supply chain.  This urgency has also been precipitated by the continuous trade frictions among major countries.  Supply chain management is faced with a need to have a Renaissance, like what happened after the Middle Ages for a cultural, artistic, political and economic rebirth.  Even though some, including myself, have talked about such renaissance, what happened now requires a new level.  I want to use the framework of Zeng Zi on the steps to better the world: First, better yourself, then your family, then your nation, and finally, the world.  I will describe how leading companies should embrace new technologies to gain supply chain excellence, to use new collaborative relationships to ensure supply chain integration, and to innovate business models to create greater societal values.  I will also share with some examples of research that are tied to such a development.

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Speaker bio: 

Hau L. Lee is the Thoma Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.  He was the founding faculty director of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (SEED), and is the current Co-Director of the Stanford Value Chain Innovations Initiative.

 

Professor Lee’s expertise is on global supply chain management and value chain innovations.  He has published widely in top journals on supply chain management.  He was inducted to the US National Academy of Engineering, and elected a Fellow of MSOM, POMS; and INFORMS. 

 

In 2006-7, he was the President of the Production and Operations Management Society.  His article, “The Triple-A Supply Chain,” was the Second Place Winner of the McKinsey Award for the Best Paper in 2004 in the Harvard Business Review.  In 2004, his co-authored paper in 1997, “Information Distortion in a Supply Chain: The Bullwhip Effect,” was voted as one of the ten most influential papers in the history of Management Science.

 

Besides extensive consulting, he co-founded DemandTec, a price-optimization company that went public in NASDAQ in 2007.  He was the founding chairman of SCM World, which was acquired by Gartner in 2016.  He is currently an independent non-executive director of Synnex and the Lion Rock Group, and is on the advisory board of Altos Ventures and CloudLeaf.

 

Professor Lee obtained his B.Soc.Sc. degree in Economics and Statistics from the University of Hong Kong, his M.Sc. degree in Operational Research from the London School of Economics, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Operations Research from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.  He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Engineering degree by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.