article · Cogent Business & Management
Government lockdowns during the pandemic led to substantial supply chain challenges for micro, small and medium enterprises. The restrictions reduced the overall quantity, quality, and lead times of supplied goods, while completely halting deliveries for certain items. In turn, these disruptions harmed business performance by diminishing the variety and quality of stocked goods, lowering customer reliability, and shrinking client bases. To cope with these pressures, enterprises adopted varied strategies. These actions included altering purchasing arrangements, trimming staff numbers, increasing prices, shutting down operations temporarily, and pivoting into essential sectors such as food and sanitary items. The extent of operational impacts and the specific coping mechanisms employed differed considerably depending on factors such as business size, age, location, industry, formal registration status, and the nature of the products sold.
Micro, small and medium enterprises form the backbone of many economies but face severe risks during external shocks. Understanding how supply chain bottlenecks directly impair smaller businesses helps identify the operational vulnerabilities that threaten enterprise survival. It also demonstrates how firm characteristics influence their ability to adapt and maintain operations during widespread crises.
The findings provide applied operational insights that business support organisations, enterprise development programmes, and logistics service providers can use to design targeted resilience and supply chain interventions for small firms. The abstract describes observational research rather than a direct commercial product, meaning any decision support tools or consulting frameworks derived from these findings remain at an early, conceptual stage.
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AbstractThe COVID-19 outbreak created a global public health crisis to which governments responded with several measures, including a lockdown on social and economic activities. This study assessed: (1) the supply chain disruptions caused by the lockdown, (2) the supply chain disruption effects on the performance of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), (3) the resilient strategies (responses) MSMEs adopted to overcome the disruption challenges and (4) how the supply chain disruption affected the performance of MSMEs and how their responses varied across different MSME and supply chain characteristics. Using descriptive statistics and t-tests, the study found that the COVID-19 lockdown reduced the quantity, quality and order lead time of goods supplied. It also halted the supply of some other goods. Disruptions in the supply chain affected MSMEs’ performance by reducing quantity, quality, variety of goods stocked, reliability to customers and customer base. MSMEs responded to the supply chain disruptions by changing their purchase arrangement, reducing the number of employees, increasing product prices, closing businesses temporarily and diversifying businesses supplying essential products such as foods and sanitary materials. Performance and responses of MSMEs varied depending on the age, size, location, registration status, product and industry.
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DOI: 10.1080/23311975.2024.2315691
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