COVID-19 Pandemic and Changes in Supply Chains: Insights from Egypt: COVID-19 and Changes in SC: Insights from Egypt

Abstract

The world is not the same since late December 2019 when Coronavirus pandemic started to emerge in Wuhan, China and soon it began to spread all over the world affecting countries in Asia, Europe, North America and even Africa. Accordingly it was declared by the WHO as a pandemic in the 11th of March 2020 which raised the emergency of public health on an international basis. Although the supply chain has faced lots of epidemics and pandemics in the last decades, but COVID-19 is said to be unique in its effect. Since the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the supply chain was not studied from change management perspective. Accordingly the current paper tried to understand the degree of changes that the pandemic resulted in within supply chains in the light of the organizational change management literature and punctuated equilibrium theory. Data was collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with supply chain managers in different organizations. The results showed that the degree of change has two dimensions, the first is planned or emergent change, and the second one is that change can be developmental, transformational, or transitional.