How can supply chains better support societal needs?

Supply chains are developed to be the fastest and cheapest means of directing goods to their destinations. Sudden changes and disruptions to supply chains (like COVID-19) can have a huge impact on their effectiveness and cause unwanted factors such as product shortages and market instability.

Project “Re-SChape”

Jaime Bonnin-Roca teams up with a European Union funded consortium that will investigate which supply chains can be re-designed to better support societal needs and mitigate against disruptions. Project Re-Shape is led by the National Research Council of Italy (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) and includes partners from Portugal, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Changes and disruptions

The ReSChape project analyses social, economic and environmental changes and disruptions. It evaluates their impact on global supply chains. This includes:

• identifying the synergies in cross-cutting themes such as relationships between countries, configuration of supply chain networks and impact on employment. The project analyses important European sectors like fashion, automotive, medical and machine tools via case studies and surveys.
• developing innovative tools to monitor and assess sectoral trade patterns. Researchers also aim to define mechanisms to evaluate relationships across different types of disruption such as pandemic and global value chains, taking into consideration the impact on employment, economic growth and income in the immediate and longer term.
• creating policy scenarios with recommendations for future global value chains. This is also the part in which Jaime Bonnin-Roca’s will focus.

New PostDoc position

The Re-SChape project budget is €2.62M and starts June 2022, running for three years. To deliver TU/e’s part of the research project a new PostDoc position will become available, working directly with Jaime Bonnin-Roca to develop and implement new policy models and scenarios.