ASSESSING THE EPIDEMICS AND PANDEMICS' IMPACT ON SUPPLY CHAINS IN THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

In: Teme: časopis za društvene nauke : journal for social sciences, S. 053

Abstract

Today, supply chains operate in a very uncertain global environment, so one of the basic tasks is to maintain a higher level of resilience. Great threats to the resilience of supply chains, which occur at time intervals, are labelled in literature as health crises. The appearance of diseases, due to their nature may cause epidemics and pandemics', which can greatly endanger stability and lead to interruptions in supply chain processes. A major problem cited in literature concerning the specifics of such situations relates to the limited ability to predict both the causes and consequences of such actions. Due to that, it is difficult to manage crisis situations, and as a logical consequence, there are immeasurable negative effects. The aim of this paper is to examine the negative effects of various epidemics and pandemics on production in the automotive industry. The analyses were employed with the aim of defining the extent to which an epidemic and a pandemic disrupt production activities in supply chains. In addition, it is important to consider the characteristic of viruses, as well as the differences in the average values of production in the years when the crisis occurred. In order to analyse the hypotheses, the authors used Wilcoxon's test to check the statistical significance of changes in production levels. To examine the significance of the difference in average changes in production for the duration of the epidemics and the pandemics, the authors used Friedman's test in SPSS.