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This paper explains the evolving role of the local supply chain across different disruption scenarios. A systematic literature review of 91 papers from 33 journals supports definition of the local supply chain and explication of benefits before, during and after COVID-19 disruption. Resilience emerges as the prevalent benefit at each stage, but to varying scales. In the pre-COVID-19 era, where the local supply chain serves as a back-up approach to the more dominant global supply chain, localisation's capacity to absorb change promotes resilience to mitigate low-magnitude disruption. At initial outbreak of COVID-19 disruption the local supply chain was necessitated as an emergency response to the untenability of global operations, demonstrating transformational resilience to survive. As disruption continued, the local supply chain upscaled and adapted to recover. In the post-COVID-19 era, resilience is expected to remain a strategic priority, promoting continued investment in local operations to thrive with embedded resilience. As a result, the COVID-19 pandemic welcomed a point of transition for the local supply chain as capacities and benefits are revaluated and localisation recognised as critical in developing resilient supply networks for the future. This study consolidates this evolution to offer a propositional framework showcasing the local supply chain across different disruption scenarios. This offers long overdue definition and explanation of the local supply chain and its relationship with resilience, addressing an existing lack of academic attention and encouraging alignment of local-versus-global decisions with changing strategic priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper examined supply chain disruptions in the manufacturing industry in South Africa and how additive manufacturing technology was used to help deal with disruptions encountered. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted a qualitative research approach in order to meet the objectives of the study. A total of ten (10) managers of conventional manufacturing firms and ten (10) managers of 3D printing firms in Free State, South Africa participated in the study through the use of a purposive sampling technique. Interview guides were used in the collection of data. Data transcriptions and thematic analysis were used to analyze data gathered from the interviews. Findings: The results of the study showed that 3D printing contributed positively in dealing with manufacturing disruptions that were encountered by manufacturing firms in Free State, South Africa through the production of components and spare parts that were broken down in manufacturing machinery/plants. From the study, the researchers recommend that 3D printing technology should be adopted by manufacturing firms because of its practicality in providing manufacturing support and production continuity even in supply chain disruptive experiences caused by pandemics such as Covid-19. Originality/value: The study proves that due to the versatility of the 3D printing technology it could be used to minimize the effect of supply chain disruption during cries such as the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the unique contributions of the current study is the realization that additive manufacturing was not of much relevance to the generic supply chain challenges encountered in supply chain activities, but rather very relevant in helping to prevent disruptions of the manufacturing process by improvising spare parts at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has continued to result in severe disruptions to food supply chains. In this research, we present a simulation study on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food supply chains and their sustainability using the lobster industry in Nova Scotia, Canada, as an example. The main contributions of this paper are twofold. First, it analyzes how the pandemic has negatively disrupted lobster supply chains and their sustainability. Second, it demonstrates how a simulation-based methodology based on the software AnyLogistix can be applied to examine the effects of a pandemic on food supply chains. We show the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic from four perspectives: production-inventory dynamics, customer performance, financial performance, and lead-time performance. Our findings include the following. First, the pandemic has created a backlog problem for the live lobster industry. Second, it has significantly increased the lead time of the lobster supply chain. Overall, this research can help the government and trade organizations to devise appropriate policies to reduce the negative impacts of the pandemic on food supply chains and their sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current COVID-19 virus pandemic has created massive disruptions in supply, demand, and production in global supply chains (SCs). The outbreak has revealed the deficiencies of non-resilient SCs. Business prosperity and continuity require internal resilience capabilities (IRCs) and resiliency to supply or demand fluctuations that create disruption risk situations. This paper develops a new methodology for diagnosing and improving the strength of a company's internal resilience. The huge disruptions caused by COVID-19 are first presented and reviewed. Then, a thorough state-of-the-art analysis was conducted to define supply chain risk management and supply chain resilience, and then to align the substantial contributions of this research to the literature. These insights are followed by presenting and defining IRCs to highlight their role towards resilient business. This research hereby presents a new IRCs-PADRIC (Preparedness, Agility, Development, Recovery, Innovation and Collaboration) framework from which a company's current resilience healthiness can be diagnosed as being either Healthy, Groaning or Dying. These diagnoses are associated with proposed actions to be taken accordingly. An integrated grey Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL)/Measurement of Alternatives and Ranking according to Compromise Solution (MARCOS) approach is proposed to quantify the internal resiliency to enable a more accurate diagnosis. Furthermore, cause-effect analysis was performed to highlight the relationships among PADRIC. The developed IRCs-PADRIC methodology can be adopted by managers in any sector to diagnose their internal resiliency. This would help them to answer the following questions: What could have been internally developed to reduce and so react to the disruption created by the COVID-19 pandemic? and how prepared would a company be for disruptions similar to COVID-19 in the future? The healthiness of IRCs of a pharmaceutical company was used to empirically validate the developed methodology. Theoretical and managerial implications were discussed, and future research avenues recommended based on research limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an abrupt epidemic occurs, healthcare systems are shocked by the surge in the number of susceptible patients' demands, and decision-makers mostly rely on their frame of reference for urgent decision-making. Many reports have declared the COVID-19 impediments to trading and global economic growth. This study aims to provide a mathematical model to support pharmaceutical supply chain planning during the COVID-19 epidemic. Additionally, it aims to offer new insights into hospital supply chain problems by unifying cold and non-cold chains and considering a wide range of pharmaceuticals and vaccines. This approach is unprecedented and includes an analysis of various pharmaceutical features such as temperature, shelf life, priority, and clustering. To propose a model for planning the pharmaceutical supply chains, a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is used for a four-echelon supply chain design. This model aims to minimize the costs involved in the pharmaceutical supply chain by maintaining an acceptable service level. Also, this paper considers uncertainty as an intrinsic part of the problem and addresses it through the wait-and-see method. Furthermore, an unexplored unsupervised learning method in the realm of supply chain planning has been used to cluster the pharmaceuticals and the vaccines and its merits and drawbacks are proposed. A case of Tehran hospitals with real data has been used to show the model's capabilities, as well. Based on the obtained results, the proposed approach is able to reach the optimum service level in the COVID conditions while maintaining a reduced cost. The experiment illustrates that the hospitals' adjacency and emergency orders alleviated the service level significantly. The proposed MILP model has proven to be efficient in providing a practical intuition for decision-makers. The clustering technique reduced the size of the problem and the time required to solve the model considerably. • Merging cold and non-cold chains to help hospitals handling supply chain challenges. • Supporting decision-makers during epidemics by proposing a novel mathematical model. • Considering various pharmaceuticals and their features using K-means clustering. • Multi-commodity supply chain benefits from unsupervised learning for clustering. • Considering features of various phases of epidemics by adjusting model parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 (Corona virus disease 2019) pandemic continues to slash through the entire humanity on the earth causing an international health crisis and financial uncertainty. The pandemic has formed a colossal disruption in supply chain networks. It has caused piling higher mortality in patients with comorbidities and generated a surging demand for critical care equipment, vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and cutting-edge technologies. Personal protective equipment, masks, ventilators, testing kits, and even commodities required for daily care have been scarce as lockdown and social distancing guidelines have kicked in. Amidst COVID-19, implementing and executing key processes of the healthcare supply chain (HSC) in a secured, trusted, effective, universally manageable, and the traceable way is perplexing owing to the fragile nature of the HSC, which is susceptible to redundant efforts and systemic risks that can lead to adverse impacts on consumer health and safety. Though the crisis shone a harsh light on the cracks and weaknesses of the HSC, it brings some significant insights into how HSC can be made more resilient and how healthcare industries figure out solutions to mitigate disruptions. While there are innumerable experiences learned from the disruption of this crisis, in this paper, five important areas to analyze the most vital and immediate HSC enhancements including building a resilient supply chain, thinking localization, implementing reliable reverse logistics, breaking down extant silos to achieve end-to-end visibility, and redesigning HSC using digitalization are emphasized. This work identifies important features related to CoT and HSC. Also, this study links these lessons to a potential solution through Chain of Things (CoT) technology. CoT technology provides a better way to monitor HSC products by integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) with blockchain networks. However, such an integrated solution should not only focus on the required features and aspects but also on the correlation among different features. The major objective of this study is to reveal the influence path of CoT on smart HSC development. Hence, this study exploits (i) fuzzy set theory to eliminate redundant and unrelated features; (ii) the Decision-Making and Experimental Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method to handle the intricate correlation among different features. This fuzzy-DEMATEL (F-DEMATEL) model attempts to direct CoT technology towards smart HSC by identifying the most influencing factors and investors are recommended to contribute to the development of application systems. This work also demonstrates how CoT can act a vital role in handling the HSC issues triggered by the pandemic now and in the post-COVID-19 world. Also, this work proposes different CoT design patterns for increasing opportunities in the HSC network and applied them as imperative solutions for major challenges related to traditional HSC networks. • The Coronavirus disease has formed a colossal disruption in healthcare supply chain networks. • Resilience, localization, reverse logistics, and digitalization are considered to return to a "new normal". • Leveraging the nexus between Internet-of-things and blockchain technology. • Direct COT technology towards smart HSC networks by identifying most influencing factors. • Fuzzy-DEMATEL approach to identify the influence path of COT on HSC networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]