Watching the damage to the national infrastructure and the transportation of Sandy, maybe a once in a decade monster storm, it is easy to focus your supply chain risk strategy to Mother Nature events. A more happy blog post from Greg Reimer of C H Robinson, http://bit.ly/TsKQka, discusses significant sudden demand changes social media may have on the supply chain. Here things that a very large number of people might think as fun or funny, generally something we think as a positive can swamp the supply chain.
In the blog post, Mr. Reimer mentions Psy’s Utube video has 595 million views. With Halloween coming, all of sudden Psy’s trademark Tuxes became Halloween costumes. When Big Bird after one of the debates was mentioned, Big Bird costumes for Halloween shot way up. Can your product have spikes in demand? Is planning done in advance to address those demand spikes?
The article listed above shows Psy on the Ellen show and you can see why he is a such a popular entertainer. One can pretty safely predict sometime in the future that something like this will happen future, maybe to the business that employs you!