Impacts of COVID-19 on Global Supply Chains: Facts and Perspectives

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused considerable damage to various industries worldwide. Availability and supply of a wide range of raw materials, intermediate goods, and finished products have been seriously disrupted. Global supply chains (GSCs), which had shown a high level of robustness and resiliency against several disruptions in recent decades, are genuinely compromised. Using a critical reading and a causal analysis of facts and figures, this article aims to investigate the COVID-19 impacts on the effectiveness and responsiveness of GSCs and to propose a set of managerial insights to mitigate their risks and enhance their resilience in various industrial sectors. The study showed that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented disruptions to the mechanics of most GSCs such as pharmaceuticals, food, electronics, automotive industry, etc. Unlike previous major disruptions, COVID-19 has adversely affected GSCs throughout all their stages with major turbulences in manufacturing, processing, transport, and logistics, as well as significant shifts in demand. The analysis pinpointed that enhancing the supply chain resilience is the main key driver to reducing vulnerability in disruptive times. Furthermore, the analysis indicated that the post-COVID-19 GSCs will tend to be shorter through revamped strategies focusing more and more on relocations and back-shoring.

COVID-19 pandemic related supply chain studies: A systematic review

“…Among the 74 reviewed articles, three narrowed their scope to a particular region: two focused on South Asian countries, such as India and Bangladesh ( Majumdar et al, 2020 ), and the other investigated the context of central European countries, such as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia ( Veselovská, 2020 ). Five studies considered multiple countries from various continents to demonstrate the global supply chain effects of the COVID-19 pandemic: comparisons included China, New Zealand, the United States, Vietnam, Nigeria, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Jamaica, and Mongolia ( Guan et al, 2020 ); India, the United States, Germany, Singapore, and the United Kingdom ( Nikolopoulos et al, 2020 ); Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States ( Okorie et al, 2020 ); the United States and the United Kingdom ( Handfield et al, 2020 ); and the global context of many countries ( Xu et al, 2020a ). In terms of a specific country, four articles center on Canada and India, three on the United States, and one each on Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Ghana, Iran, Ireland, Mexico, Russia, and Turkey.…”

“…As mentioned previously, the food and healthcare supply chains have received significant attention, with each of these two sectors being addressed in 16 and 14 articles respectively. Six articles reflected multiple industry sectors, such as service, production, transportation, construction, agriculture, and grocery sectors ( Veselovská, 2020 ); transportation, equipment, retail, fast moving consumer goods, food, apparel and technology sectors ( van Hoek, 2020 ); automobile and earth-moving equipment sectors ( Handfield et al, 2020 ); aviation and tourism sectors ( Ibn-Mohammed et al, 2021 ); healthcare, food, clothing, retail, automobile, airline and high-tech industry sectors ( Xu et al, 2020a ); and automobile, personal computer, and home furnishing sectors ( Ishida, 2020 ). Among the rest of the articles, one each focused on the industries of service, oil, electronics, automotive, clothing, retail, aviation, toilet paper manufacturing, and ship-breaking.…”

The Affordances of Practice and Research Knowledge

“…Understanding of expectations and affordances of operations in the supply chain, and designing with these in mind for the COVID-19 crises have been discussed in recent EMR articles-for example, see [9]- [12]. Shiele et al identify COVID-19 demand management as necessary for mitigating supply chain risks.…”

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Major manufacturers have also had to face the effects of the pandemic; one of their first reactions was to halt production, as undertaken, for example, by Airbus, Boeing 1 and Lockheed Martin in some of their plants in Europe and the United States [7]. Though air travel has begun to resume, the number of flights is still much lower than that for 2018, and recommendations not to fly, and even flight restrictions by some countries, were being launched more than six months after the onset of the pandemic.…”