COVID-19 Disruption Impacts on Supply Chains: An Empirical Exploration on Disruptions, Resiliency, and Risk Management Strategies

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic, which has spread to every country around the world, is causing major economic and social disruptions with far-reaching impacts on global supply chains. While the pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of global supply chains and the dependence on certain geographical areas and purchasing categories, it also revealed the importance to manage supply chains in a way that ensures long-term resiliency and building new competencies and capabilities. The crisis created by the pandemic revealed the significance of having strong risk management practices in place. For building recovery abilities and resiliency for possible similar future events, it is important to explore and understand the real impacts of the pandemic on the supply chains. In this chapter, the impacts of COVID-19 on upstream and downstream supply chains are studied by using a survey data from the medical device industry which has been one of the critical industries during the pandemic era.