Dispatch From the Director: Goodbye 2021…A Challenging Year with Plenty of Lessons Learned

My family and friends regularly hear me encourage them to say “thank you” to truckers, railroaders, distributors, and anyone they run into that is in the transportation and supply chain space.  After all, their standard of living is literally being delivered to them every day. Normally people who have chosen transportation and supply chain as their career rarely hear from anyone outside of this field unless it is a complaint. I would not be surprised at all if I were to hear that the cliché “no news is good news” was first uttered by a person in logistics. When logistics people get the job done right, it is a quiet victory.  When there are problems, everybody knows. 

Such was 2021- many quiet victories, many vocal complaints. One piece of good news is that before the last couple of years it might take a few minutes to explain how supply chains work to someone that perhaps had not heard the term before. Now nearly everyone can define it, and they might even have a story or two about how they were personally impacted by global supply chain challenges in 2021.

At the Transportation & Supply Chain Institute, we saw these tremendous challenges manifesting right before our eyes and the incredible amount of discipline and courage being expressed by shippers and service providers alike to solve them.  Another thing to be grateful for is that collaboration became the norm instead of the exception. The coordination and optimization efforts of the logistics space likely kept the economy from ripping apart. That is something to be very grateful for.

The new year is going to be very exciting as well. The industry will be resolving all of the bottlenecks that currently exist, maybe with a few more ripples and bumps along the way, but hopefully evolving from this challenging period with valuable enhancements that will make our systems more robust and elastic.

So “Thank You” Logisticians all over the world for doing your part.  You might not be hearing it as often as you should, but truly, you deserve the world’s cheers of gratitude and best wishes for a great 2022.