New book examines impact of the pandemic on supply chains

A global disruptor with a far-reaching and long-lasting impact, the COVID-19 pandemic caused changes to social interactions and business operations that we are still recovering from four years later.

To share the lessons learned by businesses, Gies College of Business faculty Sridhar Seshadri and Mohammad Moshref-Javadi coedited a book titled Impacts of COVID-19 on Supply Chains: Disruptions, Technologies, and Solutions.

“The main question that we had was we noticed that some of the companies were really successful, or maybe they were hit less compared to other companies by Covid-19,” said Moshref-Javadi. “We wanted to understand what key problems companies had during COVID-19, how were they impacted by COVID, and what were some of the main factors that affected companies’ performance?”

To examine the impact of the pandemic, they started thinking in terms of industries. For this book, they focused on automotive, food and beverage, retail, pharmaceutical, semiconductor, and transportation industries. They chose the top ten companies in those industries and examined how these companies fared during the pandemic, and how they reacted.

They found fellow experts – both inside and outside of the University of Illinois – to provide chapters on specific, specialized topics. Ron Watkins, currently an associate vice president for strategic initiatives with the University of Illinois System and who oversaw the creation of distribution of the SHIELD Illinois COVID testing program across the Illinois and beyond, coauthored a chapter on the experience of launching and running the SHIELD Illinois program – an endeavor whose need was created by the pandemic. Konstantinos Nikolopoulos from the Business School of Durham University in the United Kingdom coauthored two chapters, one on grocery delivery during the pandemic in Germany and one on forecasting and planning during the pandemic, this time looking at UK Google trends. And Mehmet Eren Ahsen joined Moshref-Javadi in a chapter examining the role of technology in supply chain efficiency and resiliency.

As Seshadri said of this book project, “We thought, wouldn’t it be nice – coming out of COVID – to ask, what have we learned?”  

Among the key lessons from their study was that inaction was bad. Companies that were able to respond quickly had more success. In some cases, companies had difficulty changing quickly due to decisions made in the past. As Seshadri pointed out, a company moving in a particular direction could have difficulty making sudden adjustments.

Some other general lessons across industries from the pandemic included:

• Companies in the transportation field had an advantage if they were able to repurpose resources to increase capacity in response to shifts/changes in demand.
• Containers and vehicles are among the shared resources for a majority of businesses. Smaller companies without access to these types of shared resources had more difficulties during the pandemic.
• Governmental agencies play essential roles by giving potential support to ensure that companies follow the rules and act to provide access to resources to all companies. Governmental support and incentives can also enhance throughput and reduce wait time and congestion at ports.
• Labor – particularly labor shortages – were major problems with the logistics industry. Lockdowns combined with the sudden increase in home deliveries intensified the effect of worker shortage in the logistics industry. People think supply chains are flexible – they are not. They cannot handle these changes in mix in channels.

There were also some other chokepoints for industries. The difficulty with getting semiconductors created and distributed during the pandemic created problems across other industries – such as automobiles – that were dependent on the semiconductors for their products. This has stimulated companies to move towards localization to potentially secure supplies in case of future disruptions.

Looking over the experience of editing the book on the impact of COVID-19, Moshref-Javadi noted, “Flexibility and agility proved to be really key in responding to disruptions.” For Seshadri, it was the long-term impact of the pandemic that proved to be a key point: “This was not business as usual. And we’ll find that there is a lot of retraining to be done.”