Impact Of COVID-19 Pandemic On The Global Supply Chain

Prof. (Dr.) Zal Phiroz, a Senior Partner at Pier Consulting Group, Author of an upcoming book on “Perspectives of Supply Chain Competitiveness,” an Executive at Fortune 500 companies and a Faculty member at world’s leading educational institutions participate in Risk Roundup to discuss “Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on the Global Supply Chain.”

Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on the Global Supply Chain

Over the years, the world has become integrated. And as a result, everyone and everything has become interconnected and interdependent in numerous ways. While the integration has been a move to drive towards efficiency and affordability and has brought nations many benefits, the increased consolidation of production in countries like China and India where the labor cost is low– has also brought governments many complex challenges. For instance, with the pandemic starting in China and their economy shutting down, the domino effect and the resulting fallout, growing shortages, and the collapse of supply chains have cautioned us about the risks of global dependency on any single country and the need for distributing risk.

As seen, the impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak are being felt everywhere with each passing day. Despite the extraordinary steps and collective efforts undertaken by governments and business and industry leaders to stem the growth of negative impact, the COVID-19 virus continues to rampage unchecked across the globe. The COVID-19 virus is not only causing loss of life and hitting businesses across industries and verticals but is eroding the trust in the current market, governance, and supply chain models.

Also, since the origins of this COVID-19 pandemic virus lie in China, which is considered to be the de-facto factory for the world, it has perhaps served to draw attention to the damage from efficiency and economic perspective as supply chains spin in shock and begin to crumble. As a result, it is crucial to understand and evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on the global supply chain for our very survival and security.

Supply Chain: Last Pandemic to the Current Pandemic

It is essential to understand the global supply chain, identify the vulnerabilities, and understand what is necessary to bring resiliency in the supply chains. To understand the complexities of the supply chain today—especially in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we must look back to the past—from the time of the Spanish Flu pandemic era to this COVID-19 pandemic era. We need to evaluate the state of the global economy then and now and differentiate the fundamentals of the economic equations that shape the global economy. When we evaluate, we see that compared to the Spanish flu era, China today contributes somewhere around 17-20 percent of the world GDP. As a result, any disruption in its production capabilities makes the origins of COVID-19 in China, all the more painful and damaging from the supply chain perspective. 

The current conditions with scarcities of critical items that every nation felt in terms of personal protective equipment globally, has brought into question the very foundations of the integrated global economy that we see around us. So, the question is, how can we redefine and redesign the manufacturing supply chain to move away from the dependency on any one country? What is necessary for the needed transformation?

The Coming Digital Transformation

It seems that from an industrial perspective, the complex challenges nations are facing today will likely accelerate the digital transformation initiatives for the supply chain. As each country is forced to face its weaknesses and vulnerabilities, it is important to visualize what the supply chains of tomorrow will look like.

As businesses across nations begin to visualize the needed transformation, it is becoming clear that cyberspace technologies will be at the center of the coming changes. No doubt, emerging technology-led business models will emerge as more critical and essential than ever in the future supply chain transformation. Digital technologies will play a significant defining role in strategizing the global supply chains of tomorrow. So, what will change?

To begin with:

• Supply networks will be capable of communicating intelligently with one another
• Supply chain processes will be better optimized to deliver better business outcomes
• The dependency on physical labor across transportation, logistics, and warehousing will be reduced
• User-experience will be enhanced

The coming transformation will be enabled through core digital technologies like internet-of-things, blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous systems and devices, drones, robots, and more. Moreover, the exploding human and machine data that will be collected in the cloud and more will further enable supply chain intelligence.

Furthermore, some key elements that we will see in the supply chains of tomorrow include intelligent procurement, supply chain control tower, supply chain data management with intelligent automation and analytics, and more. So, as the traditional linear supply chain model gets transformed into digital/decentralized supply networks, the end-to-end connectivity will transform the supply chains and meet the complex challenges we are facing today.

In short, digitization and decentralization will be the key to building stronger and smarter supply chains for the coming tomorrow. The question is how and when will nations transition to the new model. The time is now to define and design the digital/decentralized supply chains.

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About the Guest

Dr. Zal Phiroz Background: Supply Chain, Operations Analytics
Qualifications: Ph.D. | MBA | BS Hons (Comp Info Systems) | BCS
Focus: Academia, Litigation and Industry Consulting

In addition to executive and senior management roles, including appointments at Proctor & Gamble (NYSE: PG), TELUS (NYSE: T), he has held faculty appointments at Harvard University, University of Southern California, Michigan State University, and University of California, San Diego.

In his work at Procter & Gamble, he managed national and international projects in partnership with Wal-Mart, Target, Walgreens, and CVS. He oversaw numerous supply chain optimization initiatives, including target market definition, demand simulation, shrink maintenance, and the application of retail disruptive innovation techniques.

As a senior partner at Pier Consulting Group Inc., he collaborated directly with medium-large-sized corporations; including several fortune 1000 clients, on supply chain and operational optimization projects. With a focus on areas of shrink, sustainability, market segmentation, and differentiation, projects have included simulated projection and forecasting, aggregate data analysis on competitive markets, regression techniques, and clustering evaluation for growth opportunity quantification and optimization of supply chain coordination.

He holds several qualifications, including a CIPM and CISCM designation in Procurement and Supply Chain Management. Academically, he holds a Ph.D. (Hierarchical decision-making patterns for the placement of physical supply chain entities), an MBA in International Finance, and two degrees in the area of Computer Science – BS Honors [Computer Information Systems], BCS [Computer Science].

In addition to being appointed to the Executive Advisory Board for the Center for Purchasing and Supply Chain Management, he has also been retained as an expert on several cases within the area of product liability and injury, supply chain design, quality control, quality assurance, as well as production, distribution, storage and transportation benchmarks, and standards. 

About the Host of Risk Roundup

Jayshree Pandya (née Bhatt), Ph.D., is a leading expert at the intersection of science, technology, and security and is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Risk Group LLC. She has been involved in a wide range of research, spanning security of and from science and technology domains. Her work is currently focused on understanding how converging technologies and their interconnectivity across cyberspace, aquaspace, geospace, and space (CAGS), as well as individuals and entities across nations: their governments, industries, organizations, and academia (NGIOA), create survival, security, and sustainability risks. This research is pursued to provide strategic security solutions for the future of humanity. From the National Science Foundation to organizations from across the United States, Europe, and Asia, Dr. Pandya is an invited speaker on emerging technologies, technology transformation, digital disruption, and strategic security risks. Her work has contributed to more than 100 publications in the areas of science and commerce. She is the author of the books, Geopolitics of Cybersecurity and The Global Age.

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