Dr. Marcia Santiago Scarpin, a Supply Chain Management Specialist at Concordia College, spoke with Main Street’s Ashley Thornberg about how Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse impacts the supply chain in the Midwest. Listen above.
–
Full Transcript
Ashley Thornberg
For Dr. Marcia Scarpin, it took a cataclysmic world event to convince her mom about the importance of her profession, teaching supply chain management to students at Concordia College.
Dr. Marcia Santiago-Skarpin
First I tried to say, hey mommy, I teach some law of products and logistics, like transportation and so on. After the COVID-19, one day she called me and said, Marcia, now I understand what you do.
Ashley Thornberg
If the pandemic served as a real-time lab experiment for supply chain economics, a disaster on the East Coast last week brought that into focus again.
Dr. Marcia Santiago-Skarpin
Baltimore has, the port of Baltimore is small. However, this is very a hub for auto industry. So, of course, we will have some ripple effect. It's not just for our area.
Ashley Thornberg
The Key Bridge collapse put the spotlight on Baltimore's economic impact for places like here in the Midwest, where the port's access to roads and rails feeds essential goods. Baltimore is the nation's top port for automobiles and light trucks, handling a record 850,000 last year.
Dr. Marcia Santiago-Skarpin
The car industry has been suffering a lot with just supply chain disruption, like COVID-19, ship problems, and now we have this accident in Baltimore. Volkswagen and BMW, they are not affected by this accident. However, for example, Mazda or Mercedes-Benz will be very affected because they use more the port for import and export.
Ashley Thornberg
Those who tried buying a car post-pandemic experienced a nightmare of low supply and high prices. After trending in the right direction recently, car buyers now wonder about a sticker shock deja vu.
Dr. Marcia Santiago-Skarpin
Last year, I tried to buy a new car and the dealer told me, Marcia, you need to wait for seven slash eight months for a new car. No, I don't have seven months. I want my car now.
Ashley Thornberg
Professor Skarpin says the impact to our area depends on how the disaster in Baltimore is managed. For the auto industry itself, supply and cost to the consumer might come down to whether stakeholders could have foreseen an accident in which a large container ship crashed into a bridge pylon, causing the structure above to collapse.
Dr. Marcia Santiago-Skarpin
This is so hard because even the company has a supply chain management risk department. So these type of accidents have low probability. I watch a lot of video about this accident. Ten minutes early or ten minutes later, what's happened? That's probably not have this accident.
Ashley Thornberg
The Brazilian-born educator, who also works for a think tank in her home country, says an analytical mindset made her a natural fit for an emerging career field.
Dr. Marcia Santiago-Skarpin
I don't think I chose supply chain management. I think supply chain management chose me because when I finished my undergraduate, that time, supply chain management, like, there is no supply chain management. We have logistics, we have some operation management, but we do not have supply chain management as you know today. But even so, I like to work with process. I like to help companies to see the problems and I like to have answers.
Ashley Thornberg
Skarpin's passion for what some may consider a painfully dull subject may make her a bit of a unicorn. But it comes from a desire to help people see the world as one economic engine.
Dr. Marcia Santiago-Skarpin
Last week we had a speaker. She is from National Geographic magazine and she talked about a wonderful case about elephants. She had been working in a small city in Africa and they have, like, they care about elephants, baby elephants, orphans, elephants.
The baby needs to be fed and they use milk, special milk, and they have disruption because the COVID-19 and there is no milk for provide for these baby elephants. And they need to find a new solution. So they try to give the goat milk because they have a lot of goat in this specific region and it works.
And the baby, they survive like the percentage was like 70 percent. And after this change of the milk, the percentage increased for 95 percent. And she just started to talk about this interconnection, you know, and I just related with this interconnection with supply chain.
Ashley Thornberg
Starting this fall, through their Offutt School of Business, Concordia College in Moorhead will begin offering a supply chain management major and minor. Skarpin says the more people who understand the world's interdependence, the more the next big disruption might not be so monumental.
Dr. Marcia Santiago-Skarpin
I think this is wonderful because we will provide our students a background, help them to manage these situations.
Ashley Thornberg
That was Dr. Marcia Santiago-Scarpin, an assistant professor at Concordia College where she is also a supply chain management specialist and director of the Management Science and Quantitative Methods program. You can find out more at concordiacollege.edu.