A Survey of Challenges and Response Strategies of Manufacturing Companies During the Covid-19 Pandemic

In the past year, the global COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented impact on our lives. In manufacturing, strict lock-down due to the pandemic have also disrupted the business operations of manufacturing companies. From literature, there are limited studies that explore the impact of the pandemic towards manufacturing related companies in various aspects. This study attempts to answer what constitute the main challenge for these companies and the associated response strategies to overcome the challenge. A survey was conducted at a manufacturing trade exhibition that involved in-depth interviews with representatives from 22 manufacturing related companies. The outcomes of this study reveal that declining sales and marketing activities, difficulties in performing business meeting and lock-down measures are the top three challenges. Main response strategies for these companies are the adoption of ICT tools for virtual business processes, with proactive business change and diversification measures such as automation. The results of this study indicate the importance of automation and digitalization towards resilience and adaptability of manufacturing related companies against the impacts of the pandemic.

I. Introduction

Manufacturing has always been an important industrial sector, and like all the other major economic sectors, is one of the seriously impacted sector due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lock-down due to the novel coronavirus outbreak has sent ripples across the manufacturing industries. A good example of this is the automotive and parts manufacturing. At the early stages of the pandemic, China has halted their automotive production during their nationwide lock-down. At that time, China was the world's largest automotive market, supplying over 80% of automotive parts for production worldwide. In particular, Wuhan province in China was also home to seven major domestic and foreign automotive companies [1], [2]. The halt has significantly impacted the automotive manufacturing plants in several countries like South Korea, Italy, United Kingdom, and United States where they were forced to shut down their operations due to supply chain disruption from China [1].