Supply Chain Immunity - Overcoming our Nation's Sourcing Sickness in a Post-COVID World

This book provides a concerted supply chain perspective for dealing with pandemics on the scale of COVID-19.  Specifically, this book describes a new approach, supply chain immunity, to illustrate what is needed to fix our economy and healthcare systems.  The authors of this book are experts in supply chain management, health care supply chains, major systems acquisition, and contingency sourcing methods.  Based on first-hand experiences working during COVID in the depths of the nation's supply chain failures, the authors develop important themes for private and public sector supply chain managers to consider in rebuilding a more immune supply chain.  The book is targeted at policy makers, academics, practitioners, and students of disaster response, public policy, healthcare, and supply chain management who are interested in learning contemporary lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic.  From the perspective of those who lived through the chaos, the authors further explore the application of novel concepts in joint planning, market intelligence, and governance related to a national pandemic or other global contingency. 

Rob Handfield is the Bank of America University Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management at North Carolina State University, and Executive Director of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative. Handfield is considered a thought leader in the field of supply chain management, and is an industry expert in the field of strategic sourcing, supply market intelligence, and supplier development.  He has spoken on these subjects across the globe, including China, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Latin America, India, Europe, Korea, Japan, Canada, in multiple presentations and webinars. Handfield has published more than 120 peer reviewed journal articles and is regularly quoted in global news media such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Bloomberg, NPR, Washington Post, the Financial Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and CNN.  He served on the Joint Acquisition Task Force during COVID which led to published articles on the shortages of PPE in the Harvard Business Review and the Milbank Quarterly Journal, and led a NIIMBL research team studying distribution of test kits during the pandemic.

Daniel Finkenstadt is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Defense Management offering courses in Enterprise Sourcing. Dr. Finkenstadt holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2020). He has over 18 years of defense contracting experience in operational (base level), systems center, headquarters, joint, overseas and classified environments. He is also a graduate of NPS (M.B.A., 2011). His research interests are perceived service quality, value, business-to-government markets, professional services (knowledge-based services), non-traditional government contractor motivations. He has published articles in the National Contract Management Association Contract Management Magazine, Defense Acquisition Review Journal,  Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, the Milbank Quarterly, California Management Review and the Harvard Business Review. His most recent work centers around COVID-19 pandemic response supply chains and exploration into novel forms of gamified and simulated training for acquisition sciences. He is the Principal Investigator for the new Simulation and Ideation Lab for Acquisition Sciences (SILAS) at NPS.

Peter Guinto is the Chief of Contracts for the Air Force's Medium Altitude Unmanned Aerial Systems Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.  Mr. Guinto holds a J.D. from the University of Akron as well as degrees and professional certifications in Respiratory Therapy and Fire Fighting.  He has over 19 years total combined experience in Federal acquisition, healthcare, and healthcare legal administration.  His Federal acquisition experience has been primarily in major weapon systems with roles as a contract negotiator, contracting officer, cost/price analyst, procurement analyst, chief of career field management, and chief of contracts.  His weapon systems experiences include the entire product lifecycle and has crossed many major defense acquisition programs including the MQ-9, RQ-170, F-35, RQ-4, Big Safari, F-16, F-22, F119, F135, F100, F110, as well as several major subsystems and simulators.  His research interests revolve around achieving maximum return on investment with appropriated funding for Defense Acquisition programs.  He has published articles in the Milbank Quarterly and the Harvard Business Review centered on experiences on the Department of the Air Force, Department of Defense, and Federal COVID acquisition task forces.