The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to manufacturing and supply systems, proving that companies should be more risk competitive rather than cost competitive. It has also made it clear that companies need to build strategies in collaboration with governments to deal with future shocks. Recognizing this need, the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Kearney, brought together 400+ senior executives in operations and supply chain management from different industry sectors to identify the best responses to the crisis. The white paper, “How to rebound stronger from COVID-19”, presents the findings and conclusions from this survey. The infographic above summarizes them.
COVID-19 to date
The newly discovered COVID-19 has caused a worldwide pandemic, with global virus cases surging past 12 million at the time of writing this post. The global number of COVID-19 deaths has topped 550,000 with the US having the highest death toll.
Source: https://news.google.com/covid19/map?hl=en-AU&gl=AU&ceid=AU%3Aen
COVID-19 impact on different industries
As a consequence of stockpiling and panic buying as well as shifting consumer preferences due to the pandemic, a wide range of industries have been significantly disrupted. In the survey, global respondents rated their businesses an average of 7 out of 10 in terms of how their companies’ supply network is disrupted. In terms of how well companies had adapted to the impact, smaller companies scored the response of their supply chain network and organization lower than large companies did.
From an industry perspective, the automobile industry is among the most-impacted on both the demand and supply sides. It was also among the least-adopted to the COVID-19 crisis. Unsurprisingly, communication, media and technology and health sectors are among the well-adopted to the crisis.
Measures taken to mitigate impact of COVID-19
Companies’ top priority is to protect their workplace by taking various measures such as offering wide-ranging employee support and mandating restrictions. Additionally, they made contributions to society mostly by donating funds. The survey results show that there are evident differences by countries in how organizations have responded. Companies also have taken multiple other measures to ensure business continuity and to mitigate short-term impact on their suppliers. One of the most common measures is to support suppliers with analysis on risks.
If you like infographic summary of this whitepaper, you may also like our infographic summary of the white paper, “Challenges in Catastrophe Modelling.”
