The US Supply Chain: From Covid-19 to Post-covid
Sina Behzadifard
Ph.D. Candidate @ Stockholm School of Economics | Sustainable Operations and Supply Chain Management
Supply Chains are the drivers of economics. Their role to distribute the resources worldwide cannot be neglected. Compared to its economic size and scale, each country has its global supply chain network share. However, the Covid-19 outbreak was a shock to the body of this integrated network and challenged all the people around the world, and at the same time questioned the previously prevalent practices of Lean and Agile. Alongside the supply chain disturbances, politicians were also tried their chance to demonstrate their power over these networks for their interests. So, in such a situation, I became interested in how a leading country is planning to move its supply chain not only from the pandemic but also the challenges faced through that period. The following report is a small research project about how the President of the United States, Joe Biden, plans to move his country's supply chain to the new world of post-covid.
Today's supply chains are critical systems that help the economy maintain its competencies and distribute goods, services, and wealth through themselves. However, such a complicated system with different key role players is prone to deviations and disturbances, making it a fragile system. For instance, covid-19, climate change, and energy costs fluctuations can lead to severe disturbances across the supply chain.
So, I assumed that governments that have an agenda to recover their economy from the covid-19 must have plans that boost their macro-economy recovery speed and relate to their country's supply chain. In this case, President Biden gave several speeches about the supply chain's role in the economy and presented a few federal agenda and plans to motivate the economy by removing supply chain bottlenecks and facilitating the US economy's recovery and growth.
My interest in the topic was rooted in the following question:
- RQ: How does a leader like President Biden understand the supply chain and its role in the country's recovery after the covid-19 outbreak?
With this question, I was looking for a framework that can explain how President Biden understands the US supply chain and his plans to motivate the US economy to flow goods and services for consumers. At the same time, there are challenges on the way to full recovery.
Data and Data Collection: The dataset for this research project was a set of seven President Biden's speeches about the following topics with the following day:
The data was collected from the rev.com website, Rev is an American speech-to-text company that provides closed captioning, subtitles, and transcription services. Based in San Francisco and Austin, the company was founded in 2010 and has raised millions in funding since its inception. Its 50,000 independent contract workers transcribe audio for a per-minute rate.
Sampling: The sample was collected based on the search results on rev.com for the below keywords:
Based on the search results, the speeches from President Biden were collected and stored as a PDF file, which was then used for Coding in NVivo 12, qualitative data analysis software.
This research aimed to discover and construct an explanatory theory that frames how President Biden and his administration will address the supply chain in the US economy. To achieve this objective, I had to use Grounded Theory, as I knew little about the background of the plans of the US administration for their post-covid supply chain. This approach helped me define characteristics of the post covid US supply chain and propose a theoretical model based on the collected data.
In this research, I followed the below process:
1. Data Collection
2. Initial Coding
3. Intermediate Coding
4. Theoretical Coding
Data Collection: This step has been discussed earlier.
Initial Coding: In this step, each transcript document has been read and reviewed for general coding. The codes at this step were about mapping parts of the transcripts to codes that best represent a phenomenon or action that President Biden mentions in his speech.
Example:
Recommended by LinkedIn
President Biden: "We saw during the early days of the pandemic that the supply chain disruptions can put Americans' lives and livelihoods at risk."
This sentence has been coded as Covid, representing the effects of Covid-19 over the supply chain.
The collected data was coded to 60 codes at this stage.
Intermediate Coding: In the second step, all the collected documents were reviewed and coded. With this repository of codes, there was a need to connect the relevant codes as the second level of data analysis.
Example: Codes like Pandemic, Climate Change, Cyber Attack, and Climate Extreme Weather were categorized as Threats, representing threats that the US supply chain is faced.
Figure 1- Intermediate Coding Example
There was a need to categorize codes in three layers to describe better President Biden's view over the US supply chain in a few coding tasks.
Theoretical Coding: After the second round of data analysis and coding, the theoretical model was quite clear; however, there was a need to understand the President's view in his speeches. So, the following model depicts this process and how the US supply chain will be transformed to the post-covid-19 supply chain.
Figure 3- Theoretical Coding Output: the US Supply Chain, From Covid-19 to Post-covid
This research tried to outline how the US President perceives the US Supply Chain and how the process of supply chain transformation will happen from the Covid-19 supply chain to the post-Covid supply chain. This transformation will happen in five main categories: Politics, Macroeconomics, Federal support, Logistics, and threats.
Figure 4- The US Post-Covid Supply Chain
1. Politics: at an international scale, the US supply chain was exposed to competition between the US, Russia, and China. This exposure has led the American Policymakers to focus on more domestic production and create a resilient supply chain through their competencies, like Democracy and Cooperation with Allies.
2. Macroeconomics: The economic growth will be motivated by controlling the consumer price index, consumption of American goods, and increasing employment (or decreasing unemployment) rate. On the other hand, the US supply chain is thought to be one of the economic security sources, leading to national security, which is the top priority of every government.
3. Federal Support: Many plans, agendas, and Taskforces have direct or indirect effects over the supply chain players, from consumers to manufacturing, and they are following a wide range of contributions to the US supply chain, like the CHIPS act, which is focused on the establishment of semiconductor chips in the US and make the respected supply chain more resilient. At the same time, Federal investments in different sectors of the supply chain will help the network increase its capacity, resiliency, and sustainability through domestic production, innovation, R&D, and diversification of the network.
4. Logistics: The logistics network of the US supply chain is one of the main bottlenecks to hinder the recovery and prevent the economy from recovering as fast as possible. To address this bottleneck, the administration has planned to help the US ports increase their capacity and speed while improving highway infrastructure for long-term transportation. Above all, the administration is getting in touch with labor unions to increase labor supply in the short term for the supply chain capacity increase while negotiating with oil and gas suppliers, like OPEC, to increase oil supply to control the Energy costs mid-term.
5. Threats: While the actions are taken through the abovementioned areas, the US government is trying to gain a long-term resiliency concerning the threats that disturb the supply chain, like a pandemic, climate change, cyber attack, and climate extreme weather.
These actions, agenda, and plans are to help the US supply chain transformation from the Covid-19 effects and disturbances and develop the US supply chain with resiliency and sustainability in the long term. However, this transformation is bound to the vaccination process, which is another bottleneck that has a crucial role in opening and executing the recovery plans.