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Summary.
The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered widespread supply chain disruptions across the globe: chip shortages are forcing automobile and medical equipment manufacturers to cut back production, while the blockage of the Suez Canal and the lack of shipping containers have inflated delivery lead times and shipping prices. Their effects have been exacerbated by management practices such as just-in-time manufacturing that are aimed at reducing redundancies in operations: with the redundancies have gone the safety buffers previously available to business supply chains.