Today we visited the company GAP Vassilopoulos who offers a variety of services. Their services are representing different companies in many different areas. These areas include transportation and logistics, airplane transportation and management, hospitality, international and domestic courier, merchandising, financial services, port management, business solution technology, and environmental services. As one can see, there are a lot of services that this company provides which can make managing hard. Their organizational structure consists of the board of directors first then the country management. After that the country management uses both the support departments, which are shared by all services, and the service departments. This structure allows the company to be agile and make decisions faster. GAP’s first service offered was in the shipping industry and expanded into all the rest throughout the years. With their services relating to supply chain, we also learned some supply chain management from Dr. Vassilopoulos, a member on the board and the son of the founder of GAP.

The most important concept that we discussed was a lean supply chain vs an agile strategy. Before COVID companies would be fine with just using a lean supply chain, but now they cannot rely on that because it is not sustainable. Companies need to adapt a combination of the two in order to stay competitive. A way they can stay lean is by using economies of scales which is buying products in bulk so the costs are lowered. Another important thing about supply chain management is staying transparent. In today’s age if a company is not transparent throughout all the movements and processes it is a bad look and can cause issues. Also, collaboration between different companies in the supply chain is an important aspect because it will create good business. Consumers and producers also need to have communication to create efficient consumer response. This will reduce waste, carbon emissions, and more.