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Whether it's empty shelves at the grocery store or delayed holiday packages, disruptions in the flow of goods impact everyday life. But when shelves go bare, it's not just goods that are missing—it can also signal a shortage of truck drivers, grounded aircrafts, or broken processes behind the scenes. What if our understanding of what "flows" through a supply chain has been too narrow all along?

That question sparked a major research effort by Muhammad Hasan Ashraf, a former doctoral student at the University of Rhode Island, and his advisor, Mehmet G. Yalcin, a research-active faculty of supply chain management in URI's College of Business. Together, they examined the most foundational element in supply chain management: the concept of "flow."

"One of our jobs as scholars is to try to ask questions that other folks aren't asking, and to provide value by working to develop solutions based on what we learn," said Yalcin.

At its most basic level, "supply chain flows" refer to the forward and backward movement of products, materials, and finances through the supply chain. However, this conventional understanding is exactly what Ashraf and Yalcin challenged; arguing that it offers a constrained and suboptimal view.

"We need these flows for the supply chains to operate," says Ashraf, who is now a tenure-track faculty member at California State University Long Beach. "However, we felt like there was an opportunity following COVID-19 to expand boundaries and explore other flows that hadn't been recognized before."

The idea began to take shape while Ashraf was working on a separate project examining tensions in the U.S. logistics industry. As he observed, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global supply chains. It became clear that the breakdown wasn't solely due to disruption in the flow of materials, it was also a result of halted human movement.

"While goods were sitting in warehouses and systems were still running, it was clear something else was missing," says Ashraf. "That 'something' was people. We realized human flow is just as critical— and it was being completely overlooked."

Ashraf brought this insight to Yalcin, questioning why human movement wasn't formally recognized as a supply chain flow and whether other critical flows might be missing.

While Yalcin already had a hunch about human flow through his prior work in humanitarian logistics, he realized this presented a golden opportunity to acknowledge and recognize human flow as essential (immigration, labor markets). To their surprise, they also found that the field of supply chain management had never actually defined what a "supply chain flow" is.

"We had a shared passion for advancing supply chain theory," says Ashraf. "And we realized that this question of 'what is a flow?"—is where that work needs to begin."

Under the supervision of Yalcin, Ashraf pursued this line of inquiry as part of his doctoral dissertation—work that is now published in . Their research introduces a new framework called SCFLOWS (see below), which redefines how supply chain flows are understood.