Impacts of epidemic outbreaks on supply chains: mapping a research agenda amid the COVID-19 pandemic through a structured literature review

TLDR

The COVID‑19 outbreak demonstrates that pandemics can severely disrupt global supply chains, yet commercial supply chain research has largely focused on humanitarian logistics, leaving a gap in understanding pandemic impacts on commercial operations. This study aims to advance the literature on epidemic impacts on supply chains by presenting a systematic literature review and proposing a research agenda for scholars and practitioners. The authors conducted a structured literature review of unique publications and developed a framework covering six perspectives—adaptation, digitalization, preparedness, recovery, ripple effect, and sustainability—to guide operations and supply chain management during COVID‑19. The review revealed that influenza was the most frequently studied outbreak, with resource allocation and distribution optimization as the dominant research topic, and identified new research tensions, categorizations, and open questions that can inform future work.

Abstract

The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak shows that pandemics and epidemics can seriously wreak havoc on supply chains (SC) around the globe. Humanitarian logistics literature has extensively studied epidemic impacts; however, there exists a research gap in understanding of pandemic impacts in commercial SCs. To progress in this direction, we present a systematic analysis of the impacts of epidemic outbreaks on SCs guided by a structured literature review that collated a unique set of publications. The literature review findings suggest that influenza was the most visible epidemic outbreak reported, and that optimization of resource allocation and distribution emerged as the most popular topic. The streamlining of the literature helps us to reveal several new research tensions and novel categorizations/classifications. Most centrally, we propose a framework for operations and supply chain management at the times of COVID-19 pandemic spanning six perspectives, i.e., adaptation, digitalization, preparedness, recovery, ripple effect, and sustainability. Utilizing the outcomes of our analysis, we tease out a series of open research questions that would not be observed otherwise. Our study also emphasizes the need and offers directions to advance the literature on the impacts of the epidemic outbreaks on SCs framing a research agenda for scholars and practitioners working on this emerging research stream.