Effects and challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic in supply chain management: a text analytics approach

Abstract

The coronavirus has had many effects on supply chains and logistics, most of which are negative. Due to the importance of logistics and supply chain in the world, any disruption or mismanagement causes many problems not only in the countries directly affected but also globally. In this article, new textual data are collected from reputable commercial and news websites related to the effects of COVID-19 on logistics and supply chains. After collecting textual data, valuable information about the impact of the coronavirus is extracted using various text mining techniques performed with R programming. Finally, issues related to COVID-19 and supply chains are identified and divided into five categories: suppliers and products, governments and organisations, health, evaluation, problems, and barriers. Also, categorising the problems and limitations of supply chains and logistics will provide managerial insights to minimise obstacles and disruptions. In particular, managers should consider several suppliers to reduce dependencies and also focus on domestic suppliers because of transportation limitations. Moreover, companies should pay attention to the health of societies and employ new policies, as well as pay attention to consumer behaviour such as their tendency to buy online.