How COVID-19 Affected the Italian Personal Protective Equipment Supply Chain: An Empirical Analysis

Background: Personal Protective Equipment supply chains encountered severe shortages during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Many manufacturers are located in China, the first country issuing lockdowns, and Personal Protective Equipment inventories, managed by the Just in Time policy, were unprepared for such a demand surge. Existing literature examines the impacts of Covid-19 on the global Personal Protective Equipment supply chain. However, four years after the onset of Covid-19, there is still a lack of studies focusing on Personal Protective Equipment supply chain behaviour in Italy. Italy is a particularly significant case study, as it was the first Western country to be severely impacted by the pandemic. This work develops an empirical analysis to answer the following research questions. How did the main variables in the Italian Personal Protective Equipment supply chain change during the early stages of the pandemic? How can we explain such changes? Methods: a questionnaire survey is carried out among producers, importers, and distributors of Personal Protective Equipment operating in Italy. The responses to the questionnaire are analysed by applying both descriptive statistics and the Kruskal-Wallis test. Results: the findings indicate that importers and distributors experienced more significant increases in orders than producers after the first lockdown, due to the new manufacturer’s setup period before full-scale operations. Conclusions: the study might encourage examinations of how material management strategies aimed at reducing inventory can impact situations involving unanticipated increases in demand. Moreover, it offers insights into the causes and consequences of the criticalities faced by the Italian Personal Protective Equipment supply chain during the first pandemic phases, contributing to creating knowledge that might be useful to define strategies to enhance supply chain resilience.