THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON LOGISTICS AND THE ASSOCIATED DISRUPTIONS

Abstract

This research study was conducted with the purpose of understanding the impact of COVID-19 on the logistics segment and the associated disruptions in the food supply chain. In the current times, the entire world is challenged by a disease called coronavirus or popularly known as Covid-19. In December 2019, Wuhan in China reported the first case ever. COVID-19 has heavily affected the supply chain networks, logistics in particular. Markets and firms are connected by Logistics companies through the provision of different services, including multimodal transportation, freight forwarding, warehouse management, and inventory management. A diverse pool of logistics players across the world have been impacted owing to the current state of the pandemic. This paper analyzes the disruptions in the movement and delivery of essential food items and how resilient a supply chain should be during such periods of crisis. An experiment was carried out to understand the factors affecting the food essentials delivery to the local kirana stores. For this, a survey of 200 respondents (kirana shop owners) was conducted with the help of a 14-item questionnaire. Factor analysis was the tool used to analyze the results and the software used was SPSS. The outcome of the analysis showed that 5 factors were extracted which tried to explain the 14 variables used in the survey which were afflicted due to the coronavirus pandemic.