Strategic drivers to overcome the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic: implications for ensuring resilience in supply chains

The recent coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has affected the manufacturing industry’s entire supply chain system. It is important to investigate the strategic drivers to deal with the impacts of COVID-19 in the manufacturing industry. Accordingly, this study aims to identify the strategic drivers to overcome the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and improve the resiliency of the Bangladeshi footwear industry, an emerging economy. The strategic drivers are identified after reviewing research papers, reports, blogs, and discussions on social media platforms. The main drivers and their respective sub-drivers are finalized by discussing with domain experts. To offer strategic plans for building resiliency, it is crucial to know the importance of the main drivers and sub-drivers; therefore, the best–worst method is applied to determine the priority importance of the strategic drivers. The findings indicate that the top five drivers to defeat the impacts of COVID-19 are “high capability of reconfigurability,” “enhance the relationship with suppliers,” “develop health protocols to continue manufacturing,” “government support through incentives, subsidy, tax rebate, etc.,” and “set a policy to stable material supply”. Based on the findings, this study also provides practical implications with proposed research themes for policymakers and operations managers towards mitigating the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study’s contribution is unique and important for the footwear supply chain as the research on COVID-19 in the context of resiliency focusing on the footwear supply chain is non-existent.