Chapter 2: Supply Chains Under Pandemic Pressure: How to Build a More Resilient Supply Chain

Until the pandemic, supply chains largely went unnoticed by most individuals in the world economy, except for some business academics and supply chain professionals. While supply chains have often been acknowledged for their role in expanding trade and in improving commerce in recent decades, they have also endured substantial stresses upon their viability due to the effects of the recent pandemic, extreme weather events, and the simultaneously uneven rise of global trade. With such impacts more noticeable on the ability of supply chains to deliver to both businesses and individuals than in the past, there is now more public interest being directed at understanding how products can appear on a customer’s doorstep or at least find themselves on a nearby business store’s shelf. Indeed, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there is somewhat more recognition and even apprehension that well-performing supply chains are critical to our ability to control shortages and avoid delivery delays of both the mundane and the more essential products that transit within and across various industries (Page, 2020).