Supply Chain Risk Assessment: Vermont Beverage Companies Avoid a COVID-19 Hangover
In Vermont, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants and bars were closed for business for a short period and afterwards had to limit their services to curbside pickup and/or outdoor dining. The Vermont beverage companies that usually supplied these restaurants and bars, had to implement strategies to remain relevant and in operation during the pandemic. The descriptive case offers both secondary research and a first-hand account of four key players in Vermont’s beverage supply chain as they identified and assessed risk factors experienced by the network at three different stages of the pandemic (initial, middle, and later period stages) and summarizes how they managed (i.e., adapted to, responded to, and recovered from) these key risk factors.
1. Assess a supply chain crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, through problem identification with the cause-and-effect diagram (i.e., fishbone diagram).
2. Identify and categorize risk factors in the upstream and downstream supply chain operations during the initial, middle, and later stages of a supply chain crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
3. Prepare a supply chain risk assessment to determine the impact and likelihood of the identified risk factors by using a method such as the SCOR model.
4. Determine and justify the best approach (reactive or proactive) to manage the supply chain risk factors during a supply chain crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.