Shining the light on Supply Chain Canada Ontario Institute’s free online webinar series to help Supply Chain professionals respond to COVID-19 challenges.
Prior to COVID-19, the Supply Chain Management field was already undergoing rapid change, with digitization and changing skills profiles making the field more strategic than ever before. As we’ve written about, COVID-19 has accelerated many of the field’s biggest trends, while also presenting a host of new challenges, from shifting demand patterns to uncertain supply and a focus on supplier resiliency rather than pure efficiency.
The environment for Supply Chain has never been more complex – but the opportunities, and focus placed on the Supply Chain profession, have also never been as great.
On the Argentus Blog, we consider it part of our mission to share the best Supply Chain Management resources with our network to help them respond to these emerging challenges – along with our regularly scheduled news and tips about hiring and job searching in the field.
To that end, we want to highlight some great recent informational efforts by our friends at Supply Chain Canada – the leading industry association in the country – as well as Supply Chain Canada, Ontario Institute, the association’s Ontario provincial arm.
Over the past six months, organizations across the Supply Chain industry have made some remarkable pivots. Supply Chain Canada and the Ontario Institute are no different. In the first days of the pandemic, they rapidly posted a COVID-19 resources page to connect professionals and organizations with information about the rapidly evolving situation. They opened up their job boards to free postings – of which Argentus has done a few – to help connect professionals with career opportunities. In the days when toilet paper and other consumer products were in short supply, they commissioned surveys to find out the pandemic’s immediate impact on Supply Chains – finding, as we’ve written about, that a staggering 72% of Supply Chains have faced some kind of severe disruption due to COVID-19.
The next step was figuring out how to help organizations respond.
Like so many organizations – Supply Chain Canada pivoted to video. Not only for their training offerings, but also to spread vital information. To help professionals in the field respond to the many new challenges arising every day, they began a webinar series, bringing in top leaders from across the Supply Chain industry to address high-level topics like:
- How to manage increased supplier risk during COVID-19
- Improving Supply Chain resilience
- Transitioning from a “disruption” mindset to a “recovery” mindset
- Business Beyond 2021.
In concert with this, Supply Chain Canada’s provincial-level counterpart, the Ontario Institute, began their Live Chat Series. Bringing in leaders from major companies in CPG, Food Production, these webinars dig into more granular challenges that Supply Chain professionals are facing in the COVID-19 era, and how to respond. Attendance has been gangbusters, and after every event, they’ve posted the entire videos live for free. Live Chat topics have included:
- An intro to Force Majeure for companies envoking it for the first time
- COVID Recovery and Preparing for the Fall Wave
- Supply Chain and Food Production During COVID-19
- Allocation – Keeping Everyone Happy with Limited Supply
- Accelerating eCommerce Adoption
As the year has progressed, they’ve adapted the live chats to broader offerings to help Supply Chain professionals deal with other major social issues, including:
- Systemic Racism in Supply Chain
- Indigenous Procurement
And others. Like the National Institute, they’ve posted these webinars online for free (scroll down to “COVID-19 Live Chat Series for Supply Chain” to view). And there’s more coming! Here are some of the Ontario Institute’s upcoming talks:
- October 27th — Adapting Inventory, with Andaleeb Dobson, VP of Merchandising and Supply Chain at The Source. Case studies for how to adapt inventory management strategies for unprecedented spikes in demand for products to support work/study from home.
- January 26th — Racism in Supply Chain – What are you Doing About It?
From our perspective, these webinars are an excellent resource for Supply Chain professionals in any discipline, and a great way to bring the community together to highlight responses to the biggest issues of the day. So we wanted to take a moment to highlight them. Congrats to Supply Chain Canada and the Ontario Institute on these talks – yet another example of the work they do to connect Supply Chain professionals with continued learning, and to move the field forward. 
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