Brandon Fredricksen carried his giant poster board carefully as he stepped onto the escalator taking him up to the Great Lakes Ballroom. He was nervous and excited to be surrounded by business people from all over the Twin Ports area. It was spring, and the group was attending the Regional Economic Indicators Forum at the DECC. Six students had worked on the research project with Fredricksen, but he was the only one available to represent the research on the day of the conference. “There were probably around 200 people,” Fredricksen says.
Fredricksen’s project was about supply chain disturbances and how companies can adjust them, especially in cases such as the COVID-19 pandemic. His research covered the “three main supply chain disturbances: firm-related disturbances, network-related disturbances, and location-related disturbances.”
“One of the examples I used during the presentation was the earthquake and tsunami that happened in Japan in 2011.” Fredricksen looked at this location-related disturbance and how the disaster affected their unemployment rates and their production rates. He showed how “electronics and motor vehicles had a strong impact” because those were Japan’s most profitable areas.” Read more