Supply Chain in the Eras of Pre and Post COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Framework Development

1. Introduction

Global value chains (GVCs) have been adversely affected by Covid-19 pandemic (FT,2020; Panwar, 2020) and there is no knowledge as to when this virus will end. It is evident that the virus has caused immense havoc, disruption, not only by drastically reducing populations across the globe but by also affecting operations of economies which were previously running smoothly. The origin of the pandemic is attributed to an outbreak of the virus in Wuhan a Chinese province (Semanur and Ercan, 2020) at the end of the year 2019 giving rise to the nomenclature ‘Covid-2019’.

Epochal changes to human lives have been brought about by the outbreak of the pandemic Covid-19 (Wagner, 2020). Jobs have been lost, lives have been lost, economies have been synonymous with shrinking performances, all this bringing untold suffering to human life. The attention of business managers, politicians and researchers was suddenly shifted from the traditional business risks and/or pressing issues of climate change to the challenges caused by the pandemic. Strange (2020) propose the inclusion of pandemics in risk assessment plans in the future by firms. Strategies such offshoring and outsourcing which had become very popular were affected adversely because partner would unfold their operations citing the pandemic as force majeure without giving other partners ample time to adjust. Firms were forced to reconfigure their global value chains but at the mercy of policies and regulations published by their respective governments (Semanur and Ercan, 2020). The same authors reiterate that countries like the United States, Japan and Australia considered decoupling their economies from largely depending on China for both their imports and exports as these countries blamed China for the outbreak of the pandemic. In addition, the pandemic came at a time when the phenomenon of globalization was visibly under the spotlight because of worries in many nations about issues such as sovereignty, national security and the unequal distribution of benefits garnered from globalization (Kobrin, 2017; Rodrik, 2018; Strange, 2020). Based on the literature review, it was evident that there are certain supply chain practices were followed during pre and post covid (see Table 1) which will be explored in details in the below section.