Businesses suffered when retail managers refused to cooperate with marketing managers who wanted to support sales managers because they were struggling to meet their sales targets and consumers were feeling insecure about their health and unsafe to touch products or groceries. Simultaneously, many people had no opportunity to even speak to their loved ones before they left for heavenly abode. Due to various reasons like this, Pandemic had serious implications on emotional, social and economic health of individuals at personal and/or commercial front. To address the crisis, scientists started working on finding cures and vaccination, while governments globally made best efforts to implement safety measures with policies like social distancing, use of masks and hand washing along with shopping hours for senior citizens to control and minimize the damage. Simultaneously, businesses that had moral obligation to keep their supplies up and running during the most challenging time like food factories, retail outlets and logistics providers were struggling to manage safety of their staff and customers together. Even after almost six months of eruption of pandemic, one of the major challenge companies are facing is to deal with continuing evolution of the situation. The major concerns of businesses during this time has been adapting to the situation, particularly related to the supply chain because it needs individuals to travel to deliver when every person wants to stay at home for feeling safe. During this time, when health workers were reporting shortage of oxygen cylinders and testing equipment, the crippled supply chains were struggling with geopolitical issues like origin of virus amidst slogans of not only saving lives and livelihoods, but also Black Lives Matter movements of civil disobedience.

The pandemic also disrupted the education and learning process of 94% of student population around the world, which accounted for 1.6 billion learners in about 190 countries, and 99% out of these were reported to be from low and middle income countries, as reported by United Nations. Governments have been trying hard during this learning crisis period to protect education by minimizing the impact on vulnerable with support from Official Development Assistance (ODA) for education. Policy scholars suggested building an education system that is resilient and inclusive while accelerating use of technology based solutions because it not only helps in reducing disparities in opportunities with increased participation remotely. Various distance-learning tools will facilitate inclusive learning in future. However, use of these tools will increase need all institutions in the education sector like schools, colleges, polytechnics and universities to create a system of support for their workforce, for ensuring all types of safety for all their members of staff.

After the first wave has slowed down and institutions that could survive the pandemic are getting ready to pick up momentum., they are unsure about how to respond to the situation and ensure human safety. News from Malaysia about detection of a mutated corona virus that is a ten times more infectious creates further feeling of fear. Such a situation requires both commercial and non-commercial entities to not only mobilize, but also optimize their resources to stabilize the current environment and to strategically plan for the next wave, in case it arrives. To deal with the situation technology based new approaches to strategically manage operational requirements of the new environment are being considered. Many are using analytics to efficiently manage their entire supply chain because managers working at the retail level refuse to adhere to undertake or participate in any promotional activity due to scarcity of resources and marketing managers are struggling to fill the gaps in the demand. Due to this, promotions have taken a backseat and as a result, managers are looking for ways and means to retain their position in the market. Use of technology combined with analytics offers tools that use information to not only integrate business functions like operations, marketing and supply chain, but also for building resilience that allows managing both resources and cost efficiencies during this economic downturn.

Today, different industry sectors are depending upon technology for automated production without human intervention to reduce the risk of transferring virus and artificial intelligence based analytics to innovatively manage their resources and manage demand with supply. Artificial intelligence based analytics can provide solutions to complex problems, offers demand forecasting and scenario prediction using models built around variables critical to the given company. Ability of artificial intelligence based analytics to use real-time tracking for building integrated models has helped every professional to build a framework for resilience. The resilience frameworks offered by innovative use of artificial intelligence have enabled scientists to work on developing vaccines, managers to measure effectiveness of strategies they adopted for safety of human lives in real-time, identify vulnerabilities or potential disruptions in the supply chain for survival of their business.

Power of innovation and analytics helped companies during Pandemic to deal with high-stakes issues such as delayed deliveries from manufacturers’ perspective and not so serious concerns such as delayed deliveries at the consumers’ end. Building resilience for reversing the situation by lowering the risk of issues with high-stake activities such as delays in deliveries sent by manufacturers and increasing concern for low-impact initiatives such as delay in delivery to consumers is important. The delays have left far reaching impact in a world that was globally inter-connected and has been crippled by Pandemic, making it important for manufacturers, retailers, brand owners, supply chain partners to not only identify but also to identify and highlight, but also to mitigate the risk. Hence, it has become important for scholars to combine advanced tools and techniques with different business strategies to build resilience with a conscience of responsibility towards safety, health and inclusion of not only consumers, but also employees, suppliers and other stakeholders.