As the coronavirus was flaring in one country after another this spring, supply chain managers at World Class Industries (WCI) scrambled to get ahead of it, using the company’s ERP software to track the region of origin for the parts it buys to produce subassemblies for customers like Deere, CNH and Bobcat.

Would a supplier’s plant be forced to close because of sick employees or a government public health order? If so, how long would the existing inventory of parts carry production? When would the supply situation become critical, threatening to shut down a customer’s assembly line?

WCI Director of Supply Chain Luke Franzenburg and other leaders kept an eye on the most reliable COVID-19 information sources to see where the disease was escalating, and to contact suppliers in those areas to get the latest updates on their production and shipping situations. Spreadsheets were built to track supply status for parts, and key dates for shipments.

“At some point, in China and Taiwan, we were tracking 70 or 80 different parts,” Mr. Franzenburg said. When production delays left insufficient time for the usual land and ocean shipping methods, WCI worked with customers and suppliers to arrange expedited direct air shipments to its factory at various times. And that wasn’t all.

“We pride ourselves on being a supplier base solution provider, and there were instances where we found suppliers who would be shut down for extended periods, and couldn’t make deliveries. The parts number our customer gave us was made from four different parts, and we would track all four of those parts back to their original source and assemble the component in our facility from parts,” Mr. Franzenburg said.

Enter the world of supply chain disruption. It’s been the buzzword of the year for manufacturers in the pandemic, as factories deemed non-essential were forced to close, and worker absenteeism forced production slowdowns or shutdowns among those still operating.

The disruption will lead to permanent changes in supply chain logistics, according to an expert who has been researching it.

“I absolutely think the pandemic will change the whole thinking about supply chain – the whole landscape,” said Haozhe Chen, associate professor of supply chain logistics at Iowa State University’s Ivy College of Business. “We are putting doubt in a lot of traditional thinking.”

Japanese-style Lean manufacturing, or kanban , has been widely accepted as the best way to attack waste in the supply chain by getting product to the factory just as it is needed for production, minimizing inventory and storage cost, Mr. Chen said. It spawned a saying: “inventory is evil.”

“Now, with the pandemic, we need to think differently,” Mr. Chen observed. “We want to keep minimal inventory, but the system with the leanest inventory might be the most fragile supply chain.”

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