Jim Kavanaugh: WWT Gets Creative To Handle Supply Chain Challenges

‘The lead times of product shipping have extended in such a crazy fashion, that…you could have a lead time, that could be anywhere from three to 400 days,’ says Jim Kavanaugh, CEO of World Wide Technology.

It’s a challenge not even St. Louis-based global IT giant World Wide Technology can escape -- supply chain issues.

With no clear end in sight, Jim Kavanaugh, CEO of WWT, sees two major issues impacting his business: one is the general supply chain, and two is the chip shortage.

Here is a look at some of CRN’s interview with Kavanaugh about the impacts and how his company is working around it.

How are the supply chain issues and chip shortages impacting WWT?

“Those two pieces we’re seeing have a pretty significant impact on our ability to actually ship product out, [and] that’s directly impacting our customers.”

How long does WWT have to wait on products?

“The lead times of product shipping have extended in such a crazy fashion, that…you could have a lead time, that could be anywhere from three to 400 days.”

What are you telling customers about the supply chain issues and, and is there anything special WWT is doing to help accommodate this supply chain shortage?

“We’ve gotten reasonably creative, working in collaboration with the customer, and maybe we have a partner and [we] try to do some things in anticipation of some of these challenges… That has helped bridge the gap in regards to some of the challenges with some customers, but there’s nothing that you can really do.”

[We are] trying to be creative, to work with customers to help them deal with, [what I call] ‘mission critical situations’, and try to adjust maybe some supply chain availability to help them work through some of those, call it ‘mission critical scenarios’ and working with OEMs to do that. Overall it‘s a very large macro problem that is cutting across the industry.”