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Showing posts from January, 2021

A Bug in the System and the Weakest Link Mantra; Lessons from COVID-19 for Resilient Global Supply Chain

ABSTRACT: Building a resilient global supply chain is a prominent theme in the recommended strategies for managing disruptions of the scale brought by the COVID-19 Pandemic. This work is a systematic review of the history of pandemics in the past 100 years and their relation with the global supply chain and the economy at the time. It queries the weak link in the global supply chain during the COVID-19 pandemic and identifies lessons to shape the design of future global supply chains. In the review, the causes of the pandemics and impacts via trade routes and other economic factors were compared. We also compared the pandemic severities and economic impacts on most affected countries. Tracking the global supply chains route and travel routes is a key lesson for countries trying to contain and mitigate future pandemics. The COVID-19 challenge has begun to reengineer global supply chains and we concluded with a recommendation of re-identifying the weakest links, consider distributed or d