Wave effect of Covid 19 on Supply Chain
It was February 2020 and companies were figuring out what was Covid 19. All that Supply Chain practitioners were able to decode was that their suppliers in China had suspended operations for a while due to a novel virus which had spread in the country. At that point in time, the rest of the world was producing and customers buying. And that was good news. The bad news was Supply constraints were envisaged to be the bottleneck to run the business, as usual. Naturally there was a frenzy of an activity to get material from China. Panic buttons were pressed, predominantly by the Senior Management driven through the lenses of loss of business in absence of material, so additional quantity of purchases were approved as well as premiums were paid for logistics arrangements. Purchase Managers were working overnight, cajoling their China suppliers, figuring out how to get the inland transportation organized within China and a lot of work went into ensuring that the goods leave the sh...