Global Supply Chains in the Post-Pandemic

Abstract

The world has experienced, from 2020 to the present, a widespread impact arising from a pandemic crisis, which forced supply chains to be limited or even suspended, generating important constraints from producers to sale points. This situation created challenges for organizations and consumers who were forced to look for solutions to satisfy their production and consumption needs. The importance of this topic is related to the need to avoid stock ruptures in supply chains such as those that happened with certain food products in 2020 and 2021, which was reflected in shortages of some products and inflation. The contribution in this work resided in, through scientific methodology, identifying and prioritizing the most relevant preventive measures that allow responding to crisis situations such as the one that occurred with the pandemic since 2020, or the one that takes place in 2022 with a shortage of materials and high inflation. Thus, managers who work with supply chains and logistics are given a portfolio of solutions to adopt with a certain level of priority. We were able to reasonably conclude that only a part of Portuguese companies are technologically prepared to respond to the new challenges of supply chains, since the incorporation of computer systems and integrators is far from being a majority of the mentioned universe. A minority of the organizations surveyed have prevention mechanisms in the management of supply chains, since the number of organizations that have, for example, risk and contingency manuals, sales forecasting software, or even simulation of the impact of disruptions in supply chain, is significantly reduced. Given the results obtained, and in hierarchical order of importance, the TOP 3 measures considered most appropriate to prevent stock outs in the event of disruptions in the supply chain in the food sector in Portugal are: to prepare contingency and risk plans; diversify suppliers (Dual Sourcing); and preventive risk budget (cap in case of crisis).