Our BePrepared project partners from Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia, Susanne Durst, Lidia Davies, and Wolfgang Dieter Gerstlberger, have recently published a chapter titled SMEs in the Face of Crisis: The Supply Chain Risk Management Perspective in the book Increasing Supply Chain Performance in Digital Society (DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-9715-6.ch010).
This book chapter was prepared in conjunction with their activities within the scope of the BePrepared project, as they both touch on the same topic; the vulnerability of SMEs to external threats, with the focus on supply chains during the pandemic.
COVID-19 has exposed how fragile our societies and our economies are to changes in supply chains. Supply chain disruptions and the absence of proper risk management (e.g. concentration in specific geographic regions) taught us the hard way that they can severely impact our ability to access even basic goods. And these are lessons that we ought to learn from going forward.
The “SMEs in the Face of Crisis” chapter gives a new perspective on how SMEs to address supply chain risk management in times of an external and dynamic crisis like the pandemic. The basis of this chapter are data collected between December 2020 and January 2021 through semi-structured interviews of SME owners and managers from six European countries Austria, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Italy, and Portugal.
To delve deeper into this topic, you can have access to the chapter or even the whole book in this link.
If you want to learn more about SMEs and the future of supply chains, stay tuned to our news section.