The Impact of
COVID-19 on
Inventory
Management:
Challenges
and Solutions
Chevin Fleet
The coronavirus pandemic exposed multiple
faults
in supply chains across the world.
Lockdown measures resulted in constrained
supply and volatile demand, causing inventory
issues across industries. Inventory management
challenges range from unexpected customer
behavior and unreliable suppliers to rising
logistical costs.
Many experts predict that these issues will not be
disappearing soon, so long as markets are still
facing the impacts of the pandemic. Businesses
have to modernize their supply chains quickly to continue servicing their customers.
Emerging Supply Constraints
Many supply chains span countries, exposing them to even more problems. One example is
Hyundai. The South Korean brand sources its key components from China, which could not
continue providing Hyundai’s needs due to coronavirus-related measures.
Thousands of manufacturing factories shut
down during the height of the pandemic.
Although most of them are gradually resuming
normal operations, the temporary shutdown
still caused a ripple effect on production and
inventory.
Another challenge caused by COVID-19 is the
explosive surge in demand for certain products.
Household cleaning supplies, for instance, saw
a 34 percent increase in sales in February 2020. Hand sanitizer products recorded the highest gain
in the same period at 838 percent.
Inventory Management Optimization
The surges in demand and deficiencies in
supply forced organizations to optimize their
inventory management strategies. One of the
things that most companies did when the
pandemic first struck was to shift to weekly-
based inventory planning.
Instead of looking at their sales history on a
monthly basis, businesses started using weekly
sales cycles to understand the reason behind
supply-and-demand trends. Once they identified
the cause of the demand surge, they were able to
restructure their supply chain to accommodate
the uptick.