Supply Chain Disruption Factors and Influences in Industrial Manufacturing and Technology Industries

Abstract

Objective: This paper investigates the main supply chain disruption factors and influences in a set of industrial manufacturing and technology industries as well as the relationships that exist between them. Background: Disruption factors are obstacles that impede a manufacturing company filling customer orders and are treated as the main causal factors in this study. The number of unfilled orders of an industry is any obligation to provide a good or service that has not been met and is used as the main response variable in this research. Methods: Principal component analysis and exploratory factor analysis are both variable reduction techniques that were utilized together in order to isolate latent constructs behind disruption factors and identify significant disruption factors contributing to the unfilled orders for each industry. Results: Across a majority of manufacturing industries, insufficient supply of materials, equipment limitations, logistics/transportation constraints, and storage limitations were observed to be amplified significantly as disruption factors by the pandemic. Conclusions: This research reveals the disruption factors that were exacerbated by the pandemic in a set of certain industrial manufacturing and technology industries that were not extensively examined by previous research and strongly corroborate existing literature on the general challenges imposed by the pandemic on supply chain networks. This work also provides a future research objective of improving supply chain resilience.