Abstract
Introduction
As the COVID-19 caused widespread economic disruption globally, modern supply chains experienced unprecedented stress and heightened scrutiny. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, trade tensions had escalated due to intensifying tariff disputes between the United States and China. This increase in protectionism, combined with tangible costs and emerging financial barriers, introduced significant challenges for global logistics networks. Although global supply chains were initially optimized to minimize lead times and achieve cost efficiency, the pandemic exposed fundamental weaknesses within these structures. Minimizing lead times and costs had long been priorities for improving supply chain network efficiency. However, vulnerabilities were exposed during the pandemic, including a heavy dependence on just-in-time inventory systems, limited supplier diversification, weak contingency planning, and disruptions in upstream sourcing across sectors. Healthcare systems struggled with shortages of PPE and critical equipment.1,2 Food supply chains faced labor disruptions and distribution delays. Online retailers encountered fulfillment constraints. Service-based industries like tourism and transportation were brought to a near standstill. These challenges highlighted the urgent need for more resilient and adaptable supply chain models. The COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses worldwide to suspend operations for extended periods, significantly impacting sectors such as online retailing, branding, pricing, and packaging. 3 Although the economy has gradually reopened, many businesses continue to face unprecedented disruptions. Lockdown measures, self-isolation mandates, and social distancing requirements significantly halted global production activities. While firms and consumers increased their reliance on online shopping, acute market disruptions could not be immediately resolved. The sudden worldwide lockdowns during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic led to impactful stalls in production and distribution across multiple sectors. In April 2020, over 90% of physical retail stores in the U.S. were temporarily closed, leading to a 16.4% drop in sales which was the sharpest decline on record at the time. 4 In the manufacturing sector, global factory output fell drastically. Industrial production in China dropped by 13.5% in the first 2 months of 2020. Even major e-commerce players such as Amazon faced bottlenecks. They had to delay deliveries of non-essential items due to supply constraints and workforce shortages in their fulfillment centers despite a surge in demand. 5 Meanwhile, brand managers struggled to adjust pricing and promotional strategies to unpredictable demand patterns. Product packaging had to be redesigned for direct-to-consumer delivery methods rather than traditional retail shelves. These examples reflect the profound and widespread shock incurred due to the lack of flexibility in supply and demand systems due to the previous prioritization of efficiency over resilience.
Supply chain disruption is widely recognized as a critical issue for firms, and the topic has gained considerable academic attention in recent years. Al Masud et al. 6 and Pal et al. 7 emphasize how supply chain disruptions can trigger severe mismatches between supply and demand, especially when routine operations are stalled. Revilla and Saenz 8 and Paul et al. 9 focus on the vulnerability of global supply networks to sudden shocks and stress the importance of building adaptive capabilities. Jabbarzadeh et al. 10 and Sawik 11 add to this point by showing that disruptions can significantly reduce operational efficiency and elevate overall risk exposure. More recent works12,13 examine the ripple effects of the pandemic across multiple echelons of the supply chain and suggest that even temporary shutdowns can create long-term instability. By integrating these insights, we aim to better contextualize the scope and severity of the disruptions caused by COVID-19 and emphasize the urgency of resilience planning. These disruptions hinder daily operations and create significant risks of demand-supply mismatches. 14 Supply chains are vulnerable to a variety of unforeseen disruptions, including natural disasters, human-made crises, and intentional disruptions. 15 The pandemic severely diminished supply chain performance, causing substantial losses in revenue, productivity, and brand reputation. 16 Although firm performance generally deteriorated during the pandemic, the adverse impacts were less pronounced in countries with robust healthcare infrastructures and advanced financial systems. Additionally, uncertainty avoidance - which represents how comfortable a society (or organization) is with ambiguity, unpredictability, and unstructured situations - amplified the negative effects of COVID-19. The pandemic has underscored the need for global manufacturers to carefully evaluate disruptions and their consequences, emphasizing the continuity of product flow from suppliers to retailers.9,17–19 While the pandemic severely disrupted global supply chains, its impact was not evenly distributed across countries. Nations with stronger healthcare systems were better equipped to contain outbreaks early and therefore reduced the duration and severity of lockdowns. For example, South Korea, Germany, and Taiwan implemented efficient testing and contact tracing to help businesses in manufacturing and logistics resume operations more quickly. Their public health measures effectively shortened supply-side disruptions and minimized ripple effects throughout the supply chain. South Korea showed precision and preparedness through their use of drive-thru and walk-thru testing, mobile technology, surveillance tools, and transparent public communication. Outbreaks could be contained without nationwide closures, and schools were transitioned to hybrid models rather than full shutdowns. Business resumed more quickly compared to nations without such digital infrastructure. Germany’s decentralized and well-funded public health system allowed localized responses. Taiwan leveraged lessons from SARS to set up early warning systems and mask stockpiles. Quickly closing borders, enforcing quarantines, and integrating health insurance data with travel histories for real-time risk flagging enabled these countries to be less dependent on lean systems and more flexible in supply chain responsiveness.
Countries with more advanced financial systems were able to inject liquidity and support struggling firms through policy tools such as stimulus packages, loan deferrals, or wage subsidies. The cultural dimension, 20 defined by the degree to which societies feel threatened by ambiguous situations, played a double-edged role in uncertainty avoidance. In countries with high uncertainty avoidance (ex. Germany), firms tended to adopt conservative supply chain strategies, hold more inventory, or diversify suppliers to provide a cushion during the initial phase of disruption. In some cases, excessive rigidity and hesitation to adopt new processes like digital logistics platforms or flexible sourcing also delayed the recovery. As for the environments with low uncertainty avoidance (ex. Taiwan and South Korea), firms often encouraged quicker experimentation and adaptation to help pivot faster. They were also exposed to greater risk if initial responses failed. Overall, the interplay between institutional strength and cultural attitudes shaped the depth and trajectory of disruption across regions. From the viewpoint of supply chain disruption, high uncertainty avoidance implies greater inventory buffering and redundant supplies already in place, more conservative policies like supplier diversification and formal contingency plans, slower adoption of new technologies, and less agility in rapidly changing conditions due to rigidity. Conversely, low uncertainty avoidance leads to more agility and responsiveness to changes, quicker implement of digital tools or alternative delivery channels, greater flexibility, lack of preemptive buffers, and greater vulnerability to failures.
In addition to inventory shortages, decision-makers must consider the defective units resulting from inefficient production. These defective products undermine quality control, exacerbated by labor shortages and facility breakdowns throughout supply chains, thus diminishing the ability to satisfy consumer demand. 21 Swanson and Suzuki 22 explore initial disruptions across logistics areas, such as transportation capacity, marketing channels, procurement, inventory management, manufacturing processes, human resources, public-private partnerships (PPP), and security. These disruptions collectively resulted in substantial penalties, including lost customers, damaged reputations, and reduced market share for manufacturers.
Facing and managing supply chain disruptions has increasingly become the norm, especially considering other disruptive forces like climate change, financial crises, and political instability. 23 While numerous studies analyze disruptions within specific supply chain segments, such as suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, or retailers, comprehensive analyses spanning entire supply chains across various industries remain limited. In the meantime, existing studies have examined isolated disruptions, such as natural disasters, labor strikes, and regional health crises. This study, however, uses the pandemic as a unique opportunity to examine disruption within a discrete event experienced on a global scale. It systematically compares how sustainability, inventory management, and risk strategy were stressed across multiple industries experienced in a single event with worldwide impact. Our cross-sectoral comparison and principle-based synthesis of over 200 studies reveal overlooked patterns and gaps. Much of the existing literature focuses on short-term disruption response instead of on long-term structural changes in supplier diversification or digitization of logistics. Furthermore, studies tend to concentrate on single industries without accounting for the interconnectivity of these sectors during crisis propagation.
While the COVID-19 is no longer an immediate emergency, its aftershocks continue to disrupt global supply chains in subtle but significant ways. Recovery has proven uneven across sectors and regions, and many firms are still grappling with delayed effects such as inventory imbalances, supplier insolvencies, and structural shifts in consumer behavior. More importantly, the crisis served as a large-scale stress test for global supply networks—exposing long-standing design flaws that had not been fully examined in previous research. Although a growing body of literature has explored individual dimensions of this disruption, such as operational risk or digital transformation, few studies have provided a cross-industry, principle-based synthesis of how various supply chain strategies interacted during and after the pandemic. This study aims to fill that gap by systematically reviewing the impacts across four key supply chain principles, sustainability, inventory management, risk management, and strategic planning while also comparing their relevance and application across the most affected industries. In doing so, we highlight the overlooked but critical intersection between long-term sustainability goals and short-term resilience demands, a tension that will define the next era of global supply chain design.
This systematic review offers extensive insights into existing research and potential avenues for future studies. After defining our research questions, we conducted a systematic literature review of articles published within business and management fields addressing COVID-19 and supply chain issues. This included in-press articles and concurrent pre-publication versions obtained from EBSCO and Google Scholar. Each article was carefully reviewed for relevant keywords and research questions. Healthcare, food supply chains, online retailing, transportation, logistics, tourism, and education were identified as the most frequently studied sectors impacted by COVID-19. Subsequently, we categorized articles according to core supply chain principles: sustainability, inventory management, risk management, and strategic management, as illustrated in Figure 1. Our categorization aligns with the distribution depicted in Figure 1. We address critical gaps by systematically comparing how sustainability, inventory management, risk management, and strategy management were impacted by COVID-19 across multiple industries. Most existing reviews narrowly focus either on case studies of one single industry or individual supply chain principle. In contrast, our systematic approach synthesizes these fragmented insights to reveal broader dependencies, emerging patterns, and managerial implications across industries. This cross-sector comparison allows us to extend existing knowledge to identify vulnerabilities in current systemic studies and explore how to be responsive to the disruptions more strategically and comprehensively that were not represented previously. Co-word network of COVID-19 pandemic literature.
Our review aims to: (1) examine how sustainability, inventory management, risk management, and strategic management practices in supply chains have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic across different industries; (2) identify the main topics that have been well covered in the existing literature and their value for future research; (3) highlight critical areas that need further study to support economic recovery; and (4) determine which industries were most severely impacted and whether these have been studied individually or compared across sectors. By addressing these questions, we also seek to draw cross-industry insights and outline key lessons and implications for managing future disruptions. Our research significantly contributes to pioneering comprehensive comparative analysis of COVID-19’s impacts on supply chain management across diverse industries. While existing literature predominantly examines single-industry impacts, we highlight the necessity of exploring interconnected impacts across multiple industries during global crises. Existing studies typically focus narrowly on one or two supply chain principles; our review underscores the importance of broader perspectives encompassing sustainability improvements, risk management, and inventory stabilization. Thus, individually, we emphasize research focusing on specific industries, and collectively, we offer a comprehensive understanding of how the pandemic reshapes global economic dynamics and supply chain operations, from immediate operational adjustments to long-term strategic planning. Our categorization and analysis comprehensively address our research questions, providing insightful managerial implications. We suggest valuable potential research topics and elaborate on their practical managerial applications.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the relevant literature review and outlines the review methodology. Section 3 introduces our initial categorization based on industry sectors. Section 4 discusses key concerns in supply chain management. Section 5 highlights commonly utilized research methodologies investigating impacts of COVID-19 on supply chain. Section 6 reviews comparative literature. Section 7 identifies future research opportunities. Finally, Section 8 provides conclusions, contributions, and managerial implications.
Literature review and systematic review methodology
Literature review of the general impacts from COVID-19 pandemic
In this paper, we use the term “General Impacts” to refer to the initial widespread disruptions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The influences were far beyond individual sectors. These include cross-industry challenges such as labor shortages, raw material scarcities, manufacturing shutdowns, transportation delays, and sudden demand shifts. We treated these impacts as a common issue and analyzed how different industries responded through specific supply chain principles. Companies traditionally managed their supply chains by considering interdependent factors such as globalization versus localization, multiple sourcing, advanced manufacturing technologies, and complexity reduction. This part of the literature review highlights the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, resilience strategies for managing these impacts and recovery, the role of technology in implementing resilience strategies, and supply chain sustainability, as found in recent publications. 24 The outbreak, beginning in November 2019, severely disrupted supply chain activities due to border closures, restrictions on air transportation, raw material shortages, and widespread manufacturing shutdowns.25–28
The manufacturing industry faced the greatest negative impact, while sectors such as healthcare and social work, construction, computer services, software, and information transfer experienced positive growth due to pandemic-induced demands. In the food manufacturing sector, the unexpected disruption severely impacted global food supply chains and service sectors, particularly when major cities faced prolonged shutdowns. 29 The automobile manufacturing sector identified localizing supply sources and adopting advanced Industry 4.0 technologies as optimal strategies for mitigating pandemic-related risks. 30 To sustain profitability, manufacturers must ensure the uninterrupted circulation of their products.31–33 Furthermore, factors such as production reliability, manpower availability, local regulatory enforcement, transportation limitations, raw material shortages, and cash flow problems significantly impact manufacturers’ ability to meet customer demands. 34 To understand which aspects of the pandemic disruption have been studied and which remain underexplored, scholars have systematically reviewed existing literature on COVID-19’s impacts on supply chains,35,36 or clustered this literature by author, journal, and specific articles. 37
Pre-pandemic research on supply chains primarily concentrated on influenza and healthcare logistics, whereas post-COVID-19 research has expanded to address food supply chains using diverse methodologies such as simulation, 38 modeling, and empirical analysis. 39 Healthcare has emerged as one of the most critical and frequently studied sectors during the pandemic.37,40 Managerial insights from this research indicate potential avenues for future investigation and implications for practitioners aiming to enhance competitiveness and operational excellence in the post-pandemic era. Some studies compare different types of firms and industries, examining their roles across supply chains. Gu et al. 41 compare state-owned enterprises and foreign-owned firms with private and smaller enterprises. Terry and Nagapurkar and Das 42 briefly address smart manufacturing technologies that can potentially revolutionize traditional manufacturing by enhancing resilience and flexibility, while also providing solutions for building robust supply chains.
Healthcare-focused research applied quantitative frequency-based text mining and descriptive analysis to reveal that additive manufacturing primarily supported medical needs, particularly the production of personal protective equipment (PPE). 43 Analysis indicated that studies often focused on high-demand essential goods and healthcare products, whereas low-demand items and small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) received limited attention. 35 When considering supplier and retailer disruptions independently, firms face severe penalties, including lost customers and damaged reputation, ultimately leading to reduced market share. 44 Research examining workforce restrictions, fluctuating consumer demands, production closures, trade limitations, and financial pressures in supply chains offers valuable policy insights for governments concerning worker mobility, product movement, farmer support, vulnerable population assistance, workplace safety, and price regulation. 45
Educational disruptions due to COVID-19 also attracted concern from parents and educators. However, peer-reviewed publications remain limited in this area. 46 Through systematic literature reviews, gaps were identified regarding the application of Lean Six Sigma for mitigating COVID-19 impacts within healthcare organizations, clarifying organizational resilience principles supporting health care systems. 47 The literature on commercial supply chains 48 and SMEs49–51 proposed frameworks for operations and supply chain management covering adaptation, digitalization, 52 preparedness, recovery, ripple effects, and sustainability. These frameworks offer insights into potential innovations based on the lessons learned from the 2008–2010 financial crisis. Studies also explore epidemic impacts on resource allocation, supply-demand disruptions, transportation optimization, Industry 4.0 integration, resilience strategies, and sustainability measures.53,54 Ivanov 55 analyzed recent literature and cases to identify adaptive strategies for maintaining supply chain viability across ecosystems, networks, and resource levels. Publications employing advanced modeling typically focus solely on supply chain networks, omitting associated infrastructure components like transportation, creating a noticeable research gap that requires bridging. Additionally, the trade-offs between efficiency and resilience have not been adequately explored. 56
Systematic review
A traditional literature review usually adopts a critical approach, examining theories or forming hypotheses through evaluating methods and results from individual primary studies while emphasizing context. In contrast, a systematic literature review clearly defines its purpose from the outset. After establishing a research question, a structured search method is defined, along with explicit criteria for inclusion or exclusion, culminating in a qualitative evaluation of relevant articles. 57 Systematic reviews also examine the evolution of research domains based on their social, intellectual, and conceptual structures. 58 Additionally, they reveal linkages within research fields by analyzing citation patterns across publications.59,60 Such methodologies are effective for establishing and sustaining logistics and supply chain management practices during pandemics, enhancing understanding of critical logistical features.61,62 In brief, a systematic review differs from a traditional literature review in its rigor, transparency, and formality. A literature review is a broad narrative integration of existing research to provide a critical discussion of theories, methods, and findings without explicit and standardized searching and selecting criteria. In contrast, a systematic review is a replicable process characterized by clearly research questions, well-defined inclusion/exclusion criteria, standardized searching and screening protocols, and systematic data extraction and synthesis techniques. Hence, while all systematic reviews can be considered as one type of literature review, they uniquely emphasize transparency, rigor, replicability, and mitigation of bias, as mentioned earlier.
After defining the research questions, we conducted a thorough literature search focusing on articles within the business and management fields related to COVID-19 and supply chains. However, we found limited comprehensive reviews addressing broader research questions in operations management associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, our study extensively reviewed publications sourced primarily from the Web of Science (WoS) database.
Search agenda
Systematic review agenda.
Figure 1 illustrates the corresponding network of COVID-19 pandemic literature in the business, management, and related areas. It provides a mapping analysis through a keyword map, highlighting the distribution of research areas within our selected articles. Notably, the terms within the circles are not limited to our search keywords; rather, these terms are extracted from titles, author keywords, abstracts, and the content of the papers themselves. The sizes of the circles and the associated texts represent the frequency of these terms appearing in the literature, while different colors denote distinct clusters. These frequently mentioned keywords guided our categorization, closely reflecting the distribution observed in Figure 1 after removing topics unrelated to supply chain and operations management.
Analysis of the literature: COVID-19 pandemic and industries
We manually reviewed each article, focusing specifically on keywords and research questions collected from the Web of Science, EBSCO, and Google Scholar databases. We found that industries such as healthcare, food supply chains, online retailing, and tourism received more attention due to dramatic shifts in consumer behavior and operational disruptions. These industries are frequently discussed across various journal articles and identified as significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, generating substantial research inquiries and economic analyses.
Healthcare
The COVID-19 pandemic has globally impacted healthcare, with a high number of daily fatalities resulting from the disease. From a supply chain perspective, the primary cause of patient deaths was often the lack of critical resources required for patient care. Additionally, healthcare professionals were vulnerable to infection due to shortages or deficiencies in available protective equipment. Personal protective equipment (PPE) was identified as the most essential resource for combating COVID-19. The shortage of PPE became a severe problem worldwide during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020 and remains unresolved in many developing and underdeveloped countries. This situation worsened due to dramatically increased prices. To address healthcare demand and PPE shortages, several studies64,65 developed models aimed at mitigating healthcare supply chain disruptions by managing demand based on physicians’ expertise. Spieske et al., 66 utilizing resource dependence theory, concluded that bridging measures within healthcare supply chains, such as procurement support or leveraging long-term relationships with suppliers, were more effective than buffering methods in securing medical supplies. Extended procurement or resource-sharing among hospitals was identified as superior for risk mitigation since existing supplier capacities were often insufficient. Furthermore, specific resilience strategies such as agility, collaboration, flexibility, and redundancy significantly enhanced healthcare supply chain resilience during pandemic responses.67–69
From governmental perspectives, Corominas 70 emphasized the necessity for each country to maintain domestic production capabilities rather than relying entirely on imports. Governments should recognize the critical time gap between the onset and detection of epidemics and strive to shorten both production activation and procurement lead times. For instance, New York City suffered heavily in early 2020 due to a critical shortage of PPE, particularly ventilators. Mehrotra et al. 18 suggested at that time that the fraction of ventilators allocated for non-COVID patients significantly affected state and national capacities to meet COVID-related demand. Surging demand, inconsistent product quality, and disruptions in global PPE supply chains endangered both the public and frontline healthcare workers, bringing attention to PPE lifecycle management. Singh et al. 71 discussed PPE from a lifecycle perspective, examining stages from design to disposal and recycling. Healthcare institutions are advised to develop innovative decision-making frameworks for supplier selection based on technical and sustainability considerations.72,73
Vaccines and medications emerged as critical resources for pandemic defense; however, most countries relied on developed nations for vaccine supplies through donations or purchases. Consequently, efficient vaccine distribution became a pressing issue, especially regarding expiration dates. During periods when effective medicines were still under development or trial phases, the scarcity of treatments left patients, particularly the elderly or those with chronic conditions, vulnerable. The shortage in medication supply could be partially addressed through effective supply chain management. Inventory-location models were developed to ensure equitable vaccine distribution in developing regions during pandemics.74–76 Goodarzian et al. 77 constructed a sustainable medical supply chain network addressing medicine distribution, production periods, and delivery for perishable pharmaceuticals related to COVID-19. Specific regulations, such as the European Commission’s export authorization regime for COVID-19 vaccines, 78 were examined. Chen et al. 79 highlighted how technologies like the Internet of Things and blockchain could enhance supply chain resilience, providing guidance for pharmaceutical supply chain stakeholders to manage associated risks.
For strategic problem-solving in healthcare supply chains, research has identified and discussed COVID-19 impacts and recommended actionable strategies for early recovery from pandemic-induced disruptions. 80 Organizations increasingly adopted digital supply networks,81,82 shifting away from conventional linear models. Lean Six Sigma gained prominence for mitigating pandemic impacts within healthcare supply chains.47,83 Studies indicated that personal safety was the top priority, followed by process redesign and telemedicine. Dynamic, integrated digital supply networks enabled organizations to maintain real-time connectivity and manage challenges similar to COVID-19 more effectively. 84 Additionally, advanced technologies such as 5G applications in e-health 85 and healthcare 4.0 digital solutions 86 significantly contributed to healthcare organizational resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Food industry
Human existence fundamentally depends on food, as it provides energy necessary for activity, growth, and bodily functions. 87 The U.S. food supply system heavily relies on vertically integrated supply chains utilizing large-scale production, streamlined operations, and centralized planning to deliver a consistent food supply. 88 Besides the healthcare supply chain, the food supply chain significantly impacts people’s quality of life and the global economy. 89 Indeed, the food supply chain experienced more severe disruptions due to COVID-19 compared to other recent crises,90,91 particularly affecting agriculture, food distribution, and animal production. 92 Labor management became a critical component of crisis response programs.93,94 Thousands of restaurant employees were laid off, 95 and food packaging transitioned from commercial guidelines to direct-to-consumer formats. Hobbs 96 analyzed both demand and supply-side shocks, including consumer panic-buying behaviors, sudden consumption shifts, transportation disruptions, labor shortages, and border restrictions. Long-term impacts on food supply chains, such as increased online grocery deliveries and consumer preference for local sourcing, were also emphasized. Specifically, long-distance food supply chains suffered significantly, affecting welfare for urban consumers and rural producers. 97 Some studies offer differing views on pandemic impacts on food supply chains.88,98 Certain firms enhanced shareholder value through flexible supply chain management. Regionalized food supply chains demonstrated adaptability by rapidly shifting to safe, direct-to-consumer distribution. Hence, the pandemic did not necessarily expose fundamental weaknesses; instead, logistics practices were adapted successfully. Collaboration emerged as a notably effective strategy, facilitated by appropriate-scale information and communication technologies.
On a country level, COVID-19 negatively affected food supply chains in developing countries, causing higher inflation rates and lower human development indices. 99 Luckstead and Devadoss 100 highlighted pandemic-induced labor shortages as negatively affecting supply-chain-wide production, leading to higher retail prices and food shortages. They also found that income shocks decreased both quantities and prices, exacerbating the challenges. Governments faced significant concerns about food production facility closures, worker movement restrictions, consumer demand fluctuations, and financial pressures. Modifying working conditions and enhancing safety measures became necessary, alongside careful policymaking to avoid increased food prices. 45 Luckstead et al. 100 also conducted surveys among low-skilled domestic workers before and during the pandemic, assessing attitudes toward food production, immigration, and government responses.
Online retailing
Physical channels historically served as the main distribution method. However, the pandemic compelled numerous businesses to shift entirely online or adopt hybrid online-offline approaches. Consequently, physical distribution channels faced operational restrictions. 101 Companies rapidly expanded their online capabilities, though many struggled to accommodate the rising demand through logistical solutions. 102 The surge in online activity outpaced supply chain capacities, prompting further research into consumer and manufacturer behaviors related to digital marketing effectiveness, supply chain capacities, customer satisfaction, and e-commerce infrastructure efficiency.103,104
Amazon.com notably benefited during the pandemic as physical stores selling non-essential goods closed temporarily or permanently. Homebound consumers increasingly turned to Amazon for daily necessities, boosting online sales. Amazon reported first-quarter 2020 sales of $108.5 billion, up 44% year-over-year, and $8.1 billion in profit, a 220% increase from 2019. Amazon optimized warehouse and delivery operations, reducing transportation time and costs. The total volume of items sold rose by 44%, whereas fulfillment costs increased by only 31%. Additionally, the demand for remote computing services boosted Amazon Web Services (AWS), which generated $13.5 billion in sales during the period (The New York Times, April 2020). Amazon’s other online retailing services, including cloud computing for clients like Netflix and McDonald’s, experienced significant growth. Advertising revenue, which prioritizes products in search results, increased by 87%. Nevertheless, as normalcy gradually returned in July 2021, Amazon’s growth rate slowed, highlighting pandemic-induced shifts in consumer behaviors that significantly impacted supply chains from suppliers to retailers.
Social-distancing measures severely influenced global consumer behaviors, compelling organizations to develop innovative adaptation strategies.105,106 Although major retailers significantly improved online channels, small businesses initially relied on temporary online solutions, including social media promotions, product pick-up, delivery services, and discounts. 107 Research108–114 has increasingly explored how the pandemic accelerated digital transformation. Consumer preferences notably shifted towards online platforms, raising concerns about the control online firms have over customer experiences and data access. 115 Empirical studies employing the difference-in-differences (DID) method have analyzed causal relationships between COVID-19 and online sales, particularly highlighting China’s dominant position in global e-commerce and supplier-platform integration impacts on supply chain resilience.116,117
Other: Transportation, logistics, tourism, education
During the pandemic, demand disruptions extensively affected markets. Particularly, businesses handling perishable goods faced severe consequences due to transportation delays and labor shortages, resulting in significant waste and unsold inventories.101,118 Recycling volumes also notably increased. 119 In logistics service supply chains (LSSC), integrators were crucial in maintaining flexibility and ensuring operational effectiveness. 120 Choi 121 investigated logistics service capacities set before demand was known, emphasizing resource sharing as a recovery strategy. 18 Fartaj et al. 122 identified key disruption factors: supply, demand, production, and transportation. The interplay among these factors posed risks of complete supply chain collapse. 123 Studies recommended improving responsiveness and diversifying locations to handle emergencies, alongside implementing faster transportation modes like air freight.28,124
Tourism experienced devastating impacts as destinations, restaurants, hotels, museums, and events closed or were deserted. 125 International restrictions significantly reduced travel demand, particularly harming airlines and hospitality sectors. 126 Airlines quickly prioritized business continuity, cost reduction, operational efficiency, customer attraction, and liquidity management post-pandemic.127–129 Policymakers also considered protective measures for startups informed by crisis experiences. 130
Summary of research in healthcare, food industry, and online retailing.
Although prior literature has extensively examined the effects of COVID-19 on individual service systems such as healthcare or online retail, our study offers a cross-sector synthesis that identifies interdependent relationships previously overlooked and recurrent disruption patterns across multiple industries. By organizing these findings through four supply chain management principles: sustainability, inventory management, risk management, and strategic management, we offer a novel analytical perspective that reveals how these principles interact under crisis. Rather than restating the outcome of each industry specifically, we contribute an integrated framework for understanding the dynamic system of disruption and response. Immediate operational reactions and long-term strategic resilience are bridged by our study. This holistic view can inform both future empirical research and crisis-oriented managerial decision-making.
COVID-19 pandemic and principles of supply chain management
In this section, we analyze how scholars have framed their research questions according to supply chain management principles. We categorize the reviewed articles by examining key points and primary concerns about supply chain management, as depicted in Figure 1. This analysis particularly emphasizes supply chain sustainability, inventory management, risk management, and strategic management.
Supply chain sustainability
Although sustainable supply chain practices—consisting of economic, environmental, and social dimensions—have been recognized for some time, firms historically paid limited attention to social and environmental aspects. However, the COVID-19 pandemic compelled companies to place greater emphasis on these dimensions. 133 Improving sustainability and agility within supply chains enhances visibility in production and distribution networks, maintaining supply levels despite fluctuating market demands during the pandemic.53,134–136 Xu et al. 137 mapped resilience strategies to better understand and mitigate threats posed by COVID-19 and locust swarm outbreaks to global supply systems, exploring the detrimental impacts of compound crises and evaluating affected regions under both optimistic and pessimistic scenarios.
Nendissa et al. 138 found the COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the economic and social sustainability of the livestock sector, particularly disrupting logistics systems critical for food provision. Sharp regional price disparities, extreme price fluctuations, significant declines in consumption and production, import blockages, and drastic labor reductions emerged. Reactive and proactive resilience solutions were proposed to address industrial sector disruptions. Research also identified drivers supporting sustainable supply chains during pandemic-induced disruptions.139–141 Financial support from governments and supply chain partners was essential to cope with immediate sustainability shocks. 139 Strict regulations compelled organizations to adopt sustainable labor practices, improved employment conditions, and environmental management during COVID-19.135,140
Messaging applications were found to streamline direct marketing and reduce barriers impeding rural-urban linkages. 142 Moreover, technological advancements, digitization, and virtualization generated extensive data, thus improving supply chain sustainability.143,144 Blockchain technology enhanced data privacy and process integrity among supply chain partners, improving reliability and transparency.136,145,146 Despite COVID-19’s negative impact on sustainable growth, customer concentration moderated this negative effect, promoting sustainable development. 147 Reliable deliveries throughout the pandemic were critical to customer satisfaction and leveraging supply chain sustainability.148,149 Increasing consumer awareness about sustainable products also pressured organizations to adopt sustainable practices.150,151
Inventory management
The pandemic exposed critical shortcomings of lean supply chain systems, particularly in manufacturing sectors. 152 Consequently, firms had to build inventory buffers to mitigate supply chain disruptions and develop localized supply sources. Inventory management disruptions in retail drugstores were attributed significantly to factors including market manipulation, price increases, easier online purchasing, delayed deliveries, and supply shortages, as demonstrated through Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, and Structural Equation Modeling techniques. 153 For instance, during the 2020 ventilator shortage, Mehrotra et al. 18 observed that when over 40% of existing inventories were allocated to COVID-19 patients, the national stockpile nearly sufficed for mild scenarios. However, below 25%, inventories and anticipated production proved inadequate under extreme demand scenarios, exacerbating shortfalls.
Healthcare inventory management systems were similarly strained during the pandemic, as unexpected demand shocks triggered widespread medical supply stock-outs, creating systemic disruptions challenging for risk managers operating with limited information. 74 Firms faced immediate demand spikes for essential products such as toilet paper, hand sanitizers, food, and medicines, alongside substantial shortages in raw material supplies.135,154,155 Material risks varied according to disruption types, notably in electronics where raw material issues due to environmental risks could critically impact product functionality. 156
Distribution system blockages caused production to accumulate at producer levels, decreasing prices and demand due to reduced purchasing power. Conversely, areas with stable demand experienced higher prices and reduced affordability following mass layoffs. Trade-offs emerged across social, economic, and environmental dimensions, prompting shifts in production regions that introduced new economic and environmental concerns. Preservation technology featuring learning effects was proposed to maintain environmental quality while reducing total costs. 32 While researchers extensively explored pandemic impacts and supply chain adaptive behaviors, limited knowledge exists regarding supply chain management during post-disruption recovery periods. Unawareness of aftershock risks can lead to severe production-inventory destabilization, market shortages, and elevated inventory costs. Supply chains experiencing postponed demand and production shutdowns proved particularly susceptible to prolonged disruption effects. 55
Risk management
Supply, demand, financial, logistical, infrastructural, managerial, regulatory, biological, and environmental risks significantly impacted organizations according to their scope and scale.157,158 Supply chain risks correlated strongly with global shortages of essential goods, supply chain transparency issues, inadequate resilience, 159 unsustainable just-in-time practices, 160 and insufficient accounting information. 161 Risk management strategies included adopting industry 4.0 technologies,17,162 fostering collaboration, and shared responsibility.
Hajiagha et al. 163 expanded the traditional time-cost trade-off problem by incorporating risk elements to address uncertainties effectively. Kumar et al. 164 developed real-time strategies addressing risks related to increased wastage, product life cycle issues, and operational, logistical, financial, and health concerns in perishable food supply chains. Literature also extensively identified and evaluated pandemic risk mitigation strategies, emphasizing collaborative management, proactive business continuity planning, and financial sustainability as key approaches. Belhadi et al. 127 compared automobile and airline supply chains to assess resilience strategies across manufacturing and service industries during the pandemic, employing both qualitative and quantitative methods. Effective disruption risk management enabled organizations to cultivate continuous risk assessment teams responding to long-term pandemic impacts.134,136 Sustainable Supply Chain (SSC) drivers ensured operational efficiency, economic performance, rapid responses to uncertainty, and fulfilled sustainability expectations. 139 Friday et al. 74 indicated fragmented applications of existing supply chain collaborative risk management capabilities limited organizational resilience against systemic disruptions such as medical supply shortages.
Strategy and planning
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the necessity for corporate leaders to stress-test supply chains against new performance indicators, including resilience, responsiveness, and reconfigurability for future designs. Lean supply chain approaches increased vulnerability especially when firms focused solely on short-term profits. Geographic diversification of supply chains reduced country-specific supply risks. 83 Firms should identify multiple suppliers for critical commodities or strategic components and establish protocols for rapid activation of alternative supply sources. Additionally, building robust inventories as protective buffers against disruptions is advisable.
Many firms shifted portions of their supply chains locally. Thilmany et al. 165 explained why local and regional food systems responded variably and innovatively to COVID-19 compared to national-level responses, highlighting their agile connection to supply partners and rapid adaptation capabilities. Supporting flexible, locally oriented supply chain organizations proved essential for resilience amid future macroeconomic shocks. 166 Furthermore, bolstering financial stability within domestic markets was crucial to maintaining ongoing operations and continuous food supply. Complex-supply-chain firms (e.g., manufacturing, retailing) faced significant challenges managing demand-supply mismatches and technology adoption. Big Data Analytics provided real-time information and enhanced collaboration, critical to overcoming pandemic-related challenges.127,167 Collaborative planning among supply chain partners maintained smooth production flows. Firms must establish alternative suppliers and sustainable procurement strategies to manage COVID-19 disruptions effectively.134,150,168 Kumar et al. 169 reiterated collaborative management and proactive business continuity planning as top strategies. For example, manufacturers experiencing raw material shortages employed emergency sourcing from alternative suppliers and upstream collaborations to ensure adequate supply. 170
Recovery from COVID-19 pandemic
Exiting a pandemic presents substantial challenges for supply chains due to lingering after-shock effects, such as disruption tails, which relate closely to supply chain resilience and recovery management.11,137,171–179 Disruption tails refer to the delayed consequences of demand-supply mismatches originating from a disruption period.180,181 More specifically, these are lingering residues such as backlogged and delayed orders, persisting even after the initial disruption recovery, and potentially affecting ongoing supply chain operations and performance. 182 For example, excessively high inventory levels and destabilized inventory dynamics often emerge post-recovery if inventory control policies are not properly adapted to address accumulated backlog orders. 183 Appropriate recovery strategies are crucial for addressing these unpredictable risks, thus enhancing supply chain resilience 184 and viability. 136 Firms failing to implement suitable recovery measures typically collapse shortly after disruptions.184–187 Mathematical models for optimal recovery planning have been designed and expanded, taking dynamic and uncertain conditions into account within finite planning horizons to maximize total profit for online businesses affected by COVID-19.188,189 For instance, Ahmed et al. 190 integrate Bayesian methods, Delphi techniques, the Best-Worst-Method, and artificial intelligence to identify, evaluate, and prioritize key flexible SSC strategies in emerging markets. Paché 191 hypothesizes delayed effects of COVID-19 causing persistent supply chain disruptions, emphasizing the necessity of balanced pandemic recovery management. Analytical research by Chen et al. 147 proposes supply chain recovery strategies involving product substitutions to maximize profitability. Alternatively, mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) models can be developed combining emergency procurement on the supply side, product substitution by manufacturers, and backorder price compensations on the demand side.
International forums have actively collaborated to mitigate COVID-19 impacts by exchanging technologies and experiences. 192 Regarding perishable food supply chains, price-dependent demand models are considered, incorporating preservation technology investments, optimal pricing, and replenishment policies permitting shortages before non-deterioration periods, 193 alongside evaluating quality improvement effects. 194 In education, after a rapid transition to online teaching methods due to COVID-19, authorities must address new challenges related to the availability of adequate technologies, distance-learning supplies, and necessary user skills. 195 Moreover, investing additional resources in research on online shopping behaviors is justified. Although online shopping had been extensively studied pre-pandemic, the unique circumstances of COVID-19 warrant deeper investigation into how the pandemic specifically altered online consumer behaviors. 196 Modern real-time data analytics can help reduce lead times and unnecessary transportation activities. 136 Previous studies have also developed production recovery models addressing transportation and scheduling disruptions.197–199 Such models tackle dual disruptions, like supply-demand disturbances, and triple disruptions involving supply, demand, and production simultaneously.11,26 Ash et al. 200 highlight the importance of surveillance and early-warning systems that enable supply chain managers to implement contingency measures such as contract securing, logistical capacity enhancements, and emergency stockpile utilization. Literature reviews summarize current and future trends in supply chain management amid COVID-19, 201 stressing the relevance of circular economy approaches, multi-echelon SC resilience portfolios, and Industry 5.0 in post-pandemic recovery contexts.202–204 Viability of supply chains improves when large firms collaborate closely with small- and medium-sized enterprises, enhancing adaptability within rapidly evolving environments. 205
Limitations and future research
Limitations
While this study offers a comprehensive overview of COVID-19-related disruptions across major supply chain principles and industries, several limitations should be acknowledged. First, the review is limited to English-language peer-reviewed publications available in major academic databases such as Web of Science, EBSCO, and Google Scholar. This may have excluded relevant insights from non-English sources, industry white papers, and emerging working papers that are particularly common in fast-moving areas like pandemic response. Second, while we employed a structured classification of studies based on four supply chain principles and several industry categories, this framework inevitably involves some degree of subjectivity, especially when studies touch on overlapping themes. Although co-word network analysis helped validate thematic clustering, nuanced interpretations still rely on manual judgment. Third, the temporal scope of the review is largely focused on the early to mid-stages of the pandemic (2019–2021). As the long-term structural effects of COVID-19 continue to unfold, newer studies on post-pandemic recovery, digitalization, and re-shoring trends are emerging which are not captured in this review. Future research would benefit from an updated meta-analysis that includes these longitudinal impacts. Lastly, while this review synthesizes existing strategies (e.g., supplier diversification, digital control tools, sustainability practices), it does not empirically test their comparative effectiveness across different sectors or geographies. Further quantitative or mixed-methods studies are needed to build predictive models that inform context-specific decision-making in supply chain design.
Long-term disruptions due to consequent COVID-19 variants
Considering that future COVID-19 variants (e.g., Omicron) may continue causing significant global impacts, comprehensive analyses of short-term, medium-term, and long-term disruption effects are necessary, especially as more severe variants emerge. Future studies should clearly map impacts and identify optimal recovery strategies for policy formulation. Cai et al. 206 examine the relationship between ongoing supply chain operations and COVID-19, proposing strategies to not only mitigate immediate disruptions but also enhance long-term resilience against potential future shortages. Sarkis 207 notes short-term environmental sustainability gains, while highlighting uncertainties surrounding long-term sustainability and resilience, necessitating further research. Kilpatrick 208 advocates Digital Supply Networks (DSNs) to address future disruptions, utilizing advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence,209,210 Internet of Things, robotics, and 5G to effectively manage market uncertainties and supply chain disruptions. Ivanov 211 proposes a viable supply chain model enabling adaptive responses to both positive changes (agility) and negative disturbances (resilience and sustainability), highlighting the significance of agility, resilience, and sustainability in addressing global crises. 212 Therefore, alongside studying short-term impacts on demand changes, regulatory updates, R&D process adjustments, and telecommunication adoption, 213 investigating long-term consequences like slowed industry growth, delayed supply chain approvals, increased production self-sufficiency, and altered consumption trends is crucial. Such analyses can differ considerably from existing short-term-focused studies (2020–2021). Given ongoing uncertainties, adaptable recovery strategies are critical for resilient supply chains, with comparative analyses of short- and long-term economic structural changes being particularly valuable.
Impacts of the pandemic on industry types
Different supply chain characteristics can produce vastly varying pandemic effects, a point not to be ignored. 26 Without research on specific supply chains, high-demand versus low-demand products, policymakers only acquire broad insights, lacking precise decision-making information. Future studies should analyze pandemic effects across diverse product categories, helping firms strategically allocate resources, such as online distribution capabilities, which significantly influence disruption-period performance. Nearly all manufacturing sectors faced COVID-19 impacts, although product types resulted in varying effects. 155 Manufacturers of high-demand, essential items expanded machinery, shifts, idle-time utilization, and workforce hiring to address surging product demands. Pandemic-induced raw material supply constraints contrasted sharply with increasing demands for essentials like toilet paper, sanitizers, food, and medicine, whereas demands for non-essentials like sporting goods and garments plummeted.214,215 Immediate production disruptions could collapse processes without swift actions. 27 Nayak et al. 216 detail COVID-19 impacts across multiple industries, suggesting sector-specific strategies and governmental policy measures. Thus, sector-specific pandemic research, rather than generalized approaches, facilitates precise analyses of industry-level disruptions beneficial for policymakers, administrators, and researchers.
Newly rising technology and mitigation for the COVID-19 pandemic
Another promising area for future research is the increasing adoption of additive manufacturing.217,218 Given the high frequency of appearance of this technology in our systematic review search, researchers should explore its potential more deeply in the topics of how it meets quality, quantity, and consumer demand under pandemic disruptions. Novak and Loy 219 recognize its contributions during the early stages of COVID-19 and provide a valuable review focusing on product design tailored for 3D printing, the application in distributed healthcare manufacturing, and public perceptions. Arora et al. 220 further discuss how additive manufacturing played a significant role when traditional production systems faced disruptions. In response to urgent demands, many manufacturers turned to additive technologies to meet time-sensitive needs. 221 For example, during early supply chain breakdowns, hospitals relied on 3D printing by benefiting from its flexibility and localized deployment to produce ventilator parts and various PPE items.
Undoubtedly, the rise of additive manufacturing will bring deep and lasting influences on traditional production systems by enabling design versatility, lowering infrastructure constraints, reducing costs, and improving responsiveness. However, unlocking this potential requires thoughtful implementation rather than simply technological maturity. To bridge this gap, we suggest several practical directions. First, regulatory clarity around quality, safety, and IP rights is essential. Second, the partnerships between public and private departments can play a vital role in scaling adoption, especially in critical areas like healthcare. Third, investment incentives (especially for SMEs) can lower the financial barriers to entry. Besides funding, building a workforce base of high skills through training programs is equally crucial. Lastly, backup plans in case of emergency should formally incorporate additive manufacturing as a pre-integrated mechanism for pivoting during systemic shocks, instead of a last resort.
Transformation of business
As global lockdowns gradually lifted, managers faced new challenges and began addressing previously overlooked concerns. Companies gradually requested that employees return to workplaces while adhering to new safety regulations, implying changes in commuting methods and office environments. In this context, firms require detailed research to identify which employees should return based on essential business needs, considering their personal circumstances, family backgrounds, and health status, to develop optimal employment structures. Executives would benefit from robust references in the literature regarding the effective implementation of new workplace policies and enhanced communication strategies, as organizations navigate these unprecedented situations. Other management concerns include human resource restructuring, cost optimization, identification of emerging business opportunities, and short- to medium-term resource reallocations. A key question emerges: what form will hybrid-remote working models take in the future? From a supply chain management perspective, costs, supplies, and operational adjustments significantly impact business structures. The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted previously stable systems, significantly altering human resources, material availability, production facilities, retail pricing, and other critical areas. Pre-pandemic reports have become insufficient, emphasizing the need for updated managerial insights. Additionally, from organizational behavior and business administration perspectives, there is a scarcity of literature addressing appropriate management and leadership styles for effectively overseeing predominantly remote organizations, indicating a valuable research gap.
Shifting consumer behaviors and the rise of e-commerce
The pandemic significantly influenced consumer shopping behaviors, both temporally and spatially. Reports from newspapers, journals, and annual financial disclosures provide evidence of increased e-commerce activity during the pandemic and a subsequent moderation as restrictions eased. Although customers have returned to physical stores, online shopping activity remains substantially higher than pre-pandemic levels, and traditional brick-and-mortar stores have not fully recovered their previous prosperity. Investigating whether consumer behavior has been permanently altered by the pandemic is essential. Potential reasons include increased convenience, improved product accessibility, clearer product information, and enhanced opportunities for comparison across multiple online platforms. Existing literature predominantly addresses consumer behavior changes within general consumption areas.106,222,223 However, relatively few studies have explored shifts in consumer behavior specific to medical and pharmaceutical product purchases. High-quality medical supply services and efficient inventory management remain crucial priorities for healthcare sectors. 224 Empirical research identifying which online platforms experienced greater disruptions or benefits due to the pandemic is valuable. These insights would greatly assist current e-commerce businesses and entrepreneurs considering transitioning from traditional retail to online platforms.
The widely discussed case of Zara during the pandemic not only exemplifies the disruption in logistics of fashion industries, but represents the intersection of multiple supply chain principles. After being seriously impacted by widespread store closures, Zara pivoted toward a more resilient supply chain strategy including dynamic inventory buffering, regionalized sourcing, and rapid channel adaptation. These changes reflected a deliberate shift in emphasis from lean efficiency to responsive risk management. However, such adjustments also involved tradeoffs, such as increased overstock risk and decreased sustainability alignment. In other words, it illustrates how short-term operational agility can constrain long-term strategic goals. We interpret Zara as a dynamic example of how firms navigated simultaneous pressures across sustainability, inventory management, risk mitigation, and strategic planning. This case shows the conflicts between different principles we discussed in our theory, and how companies adjusted their strategies to deal with them.
A deeper analysis across these four principles shows that sustainability, inventory management, risk management, and strategic management do not work separately. During the COVID-19 crisis, companies often had to choose between maintaining lean inventories and building resilience, or between reducing short-term risk and pursuing long-term sustainability. These difficult choices appeared not only within individual company decisions but also across different industries and created patterns of compromise and strategic adjustments. By studying how organizations adjusted these competing priorities during the crisis, we can better understand how companies modify their supply chain approaches when confronting major disruptions.
Figure 2 illustrates the conceptual diagram derived from our systematic review to map the dynamic interactions among the four principles under pandemic disruption. These principles do not function independently but reinforce or constrain one another in complex ways. For example, risk mitigation strategies such as diversifying suppliers can conflict with just-in-time inventory policies. Or, Long-term sustainability goals may influence or be deprioritized by short-term crisis response. The figure captures these interactive dependencies and highlights how organizations dynamically rebalance their priorities in competition as part of their adaptive responses to systemic shocks. Dynamic interactions among sustainability, inventory, risk, and strategic principles in supply chain disruption response.
While these examples offer practical insights, existing literature still lacks a longitudinal structure across industries for evaluating which mitigation strategies are most effective under specific types of disruption. For example, among inventory buffering, supplier diversification, and digital analytics, which one is the most efficient way? Most current studies are either anecdotal case analyses or focused on a single principle like risk management or resilience. Future research should aim to develop comparative models based on evidences to guide firms in customizing mitigation portfolios according to their industry characteristics, geographic exposure, and digital maturity. Such models will bridge the gap between theories and practical application and provide a forward-looking map for supply chain design under current global economic crisis.
Ripple effect of the pandemic
Observing the ripple effects of shortages in daily necessities, food, automobiles, and high-tech products, Garvey and Carnovale 225 emphasize how the COVID-19 pandemic revealed inherent weaknesses in globalized manufacturing systems. The ripple effect within supply chains originates from disruption propagation starting at initial disruption points and subsequently spreading across supply, production, and distribution networks. Academia should further investigate the ripple effect concept, as limited integrated modeling frameworks exist 226 capable of systematically disaggregating workforce disruption ripple effects across interdependent infrastructure systems, geographical regions, and various recovery timelines, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The ripple effect underscores arguments emphasizing the necessity of integrated, collaborative global supply chains or vertically integrated supply chains with reduced reliance on international borders. 37
Integration of sustainability and resilience
While sustainability and resilience in supply chain design are equally important and cannot be considered separately, we intend to explore the intersection between them more deeply in future work. This paper has discussed these concepts individually within the context of the pandemic, but our contribution in their integration remains underdeveloped in both the academic literature and practical application. Inspired by system design research such as Madni and Jackson, 227 which highlights how sustainability and resilience can be mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting objectives, we will aim to bridge this conceptual gap. Specifically, our research plan is to investigate how long-term sustainability initiatives may simultaneously contribute to or constrain operational resilience during high-impact disruptions. For example, local sourcing, circular logistics, or carbon-neutral strategies can be further studied. Conversely, we are also interested in how resilience-orientated decisions, like maintaining redundancy or building excess capacity, affect environmental and social sustainability targets.
While our primary focus remains on sustainability, we acknowledge that resilience is closely related and often emerges as a co-benefit of sustainable strategies. Our construction of this study does not exclude resilience, but rather integrates it indirectly through the considerations of long-term strategies. Our findings reveal the growing importance and need for future research in the integration of sustainability and resilience. The current literature mostly addresses these two topics separately, but the pandemic reminds people that they are deeply intertwined. This close relationship will drive us to propose a more integrated supply chain framework that helps firms balance short-term agility with long-term viability, especially under current unstable global economics due to prolonged uncertainty of government policies. By aligning with both scholarly discourse and managerial realities, this research direction promises to advance the theoretical and practical insights into supply chain system design resilient to disruptions caused by economic or natural disaster factors.
Conclusions
This study contributes significantly as a pioneering effort in comprehensively comparing COVID-19 impacts on supply chain management across various significantly affected industries. Although the topic of the pandemic may no longer be of immediate urgency to the world, the lessons it revealed remain critical to understanding ongoing global economic disruptions. Practically speaking, COVID-19 can be viewed as a natural stress test for the global supply chain. It exposed the structural vulnerabilities that remain unsolved in light of newly emerging threats. The existing literature connecting sharp global disruptions and supply chain management remains relatively limited compared to traditional supply chain research. The relevance of this work extends beyond the COVID-19 era. The escalating U.S. tariff policies and the expiration of massive tranches of U.S. treasury debts are creating new waves of economic uncertainty and unpredictability, which can mirror the effects seen during the pandemic. No matter whether these shocks are political, financial, or viral, they can still paralyze supply chains and inflate costs. Based on this concept, COVID-19 is not a unique event but rather a prototype of the volatility for which the whole world should always be fully prepared. We conducted an extensive search and organized articles from prominent sources within operations management, addressing key concerns and outlining future research directions to address challenges by disruptions and strategies for mitigating their impacts. This systematic review identifies critical topics for economic recovery that require further investigation. Selected articles were systematically categorized and analyzed according to the most frequently studied industries.
Subsequently, we examined how researchers formulated their questions based on prevalent supply chain management principles. Our focus on sustainability rather than resilience tends to explore long-term design principles of supply chains that were usually overlooked in pandemic-related research. However our findings suggest that sustainability cannot be treated only as a peripheral concern, but should become a central factor in firms’ ability to withstand and recover from disruptions. Much of the literature emphasizes short-term resilience strategies, emergency procurement, local sourcing, and so on. What was missing was a broader understanding of how supply chains can align with environmental changes and social expectations during any global impact. Sustainability is a strong support to future resilience when properly integrated. Companies with sustainable sourcing practices and localized logistics models exhibited greater adaptive capacity than those relying solely on lean or just-in-time systems. By analyzing sustainability in relation to risk, inventory, and strategy, this paper reframes it as a critical enabler with an expectation to integrate resilience in the extended research. This integrated view contributes to both theory and managerial practice by encouraging future research to move beyond single-sector frameworks and explore how firms can build supply chains that are environmentally and socially durable. For sure, sustainability without embedded resilience is brittle. Our findings in this review inform us of the urgent need to link these two principles strategically. As noted in section 5.8, future research will explicitly focus on this integration and how resilience can imply the capacity to absorb shocks. We believe this review offers not just a summary of past studies, but a foundation for rethinking the design priorities of modern supply chain systems.
Additionally, we highlighted various methodologies employed in existing literature and suggested pertinent research questions for applying these methodologies effectively. Our analysis also emphasizes the necessity of allocating additional research resources to important yet relatively understudied topics such as online shopping behaviors 119 and educational system impacts. 195 Considering the unexpected nature of the disruptions, economic and business recovery requires increased attention in areas such as decision-making, revised production planning, and minimizing disruption effects on essential high-demand manufacturing sectors. Further, research questions addressing optimal response timing, inventory management strategies, and lockdown implications remain critically important as pandemic effects persist and new global economic crises approach. Therefore, this systematic literature review provides both extensive insights into current research and outlines numerous avenues for future exploration. By extending the conversation beyond COVID-19, this paper aims to inspire both future research and practices that are structurally adaptive, environmentally conscious, and economically viable.
Footnotes
ORCID iD
