COVID-19 supply chain resilience modelling for the dairy industry
Inderasan Munien, Arnesh Telukdarie
Abstract
Precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the extant global supply chain is transitioning from an efficiency fixated system to a system orientated on resilience. Key factors advancing this transformation include localisation and digitalisation. A system dynamics model is formulated to facilitate the investigation of the aforementioned factors impact on the cost structure of the dairy sector. A 3 level, 2 factor experiment reveals the confounding effect of the two factors to be a decrease in the mean cost across the system mediated primarily by the cascading benefits of digitalisation on innovation, continuous improvement and the concomitant efficiency enhancement. Analysis of the simulation results establishes that employment is augmented by digitalisation and localisation but constrained by skills scarcity. An extended model incorporating a more comprehensive description of the dairy sub-sector would be indispensable to informing policy and strategic and tactical decision making for resilience based designs.