Perspectives on Supply Chain Management in a Pandemic and the Post-COVID-19 Era

Abstract

This article draws out some perspectives on the management of product supply chains in the event of a pandemic through cases specific to certain industries: automotive equipment, personal computers (PCs), and home furnishings. In particular, the discussion is based on "distributed management and centralized management of a single location" and the dynamic capability of organizational theory derived from supply chain risk assessment studies. Results show that the automotive industry is shifting to a centralized management model that takes advantage of its inherent closedintegral strengths by increasing proximity to the country of production, while the PC industry is shifting to a model that takes advantage of its global supply chain while maintaining transactions with local suppliers. For the home furnishings industry, results show that "tighter vertical integration" is required.

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

“…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.…”

“…Low-demand items, such as textiles, oil, and automobiles, are bearing the brunt of this pandemic as sales of these products—and thus cash inflow and profit—have decreased substantially ( Majumdar et al, 2020 ). Given that customized strategies are needed by firms in various industries ( Ishida, 2020 ), future studies exploring how supply chains for these low-demand items can survive during this pandemic, and recover in the post-COVID-19 era, are needed. As complexity-disruption-interfaces are not explored in the previous studies, we also suggest considering this in future studies on designing resilience strategies.…”

Fighting against COVID-19: what operations research can help and the sense-and-respond framework

“…Even though the exact situation is still largely unknown, a few studies have proposed and discussed some important points for this period of time. To be specific, in an insightful study, Ishida (2020) proposes various measures that need to be addressed in the post-COVID-19 era for supply chains selling tangible products. The author examines global supply chain operations for industries including auto-mobile, personal computers and home furnishing.…”

Editorial

“…The final article in this EMR issue's COVID series by Siebert et al returns to issues facing the supply chain during this crisis. In our last issue of EMR, a number of supply chain and COVID articles appeared-for example, [8]- [10]. The supply chain and its brittleness were in the news at the breakout of the COVID crisis.…”