Managing operations resources and processes for competitive advantage : A study on the performance of Swedish pharmaceutical companies during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract: The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused immense challenges to businesses and people’s lives. For the pharmaceutical industry, these challenges entail changes in demand, supply chain, consumption trends, as well as a shift towards telemedicine and changes in R&D priorities. To respond to these market changes, firms must reallocate their resources and modify their processes, which requires an agility in the firms’ structure and management practices.The aim of this work was to identify how firms can manage their operations resources and processes to adapt to sudden market change and facilitate crisis-driven digital transformation. The objective is to investigate how firms’ operations strategy and organizational attributes affect firm performance under the changing market conditions during the recent pandemic. To do this, we analyzed the operations strategy of 13 large (more than 250 employees) pharmaceutical firms in Sweden qualitatively. Using the operations strategy matrix as a guiding tool, keywords describing the decision areas and performance objectives of these firm were used for searching online published information. By reviewing annual reports, press releases and articles in trade journals, information on firms’ strategic priorities was extracted. By the use of pattern matching, the relation between firms’ strategic preferences and their ability to adapt to market changes was established. Moreover, we analyzed the relation between pharmaceutical firms’ financial performance, their organization attributes (i.e., span of control, financial resources and intellectual resources) and crisis conditions quantitatively. For this purpose, OLS regression and panel (data) analysis was used to identify significant variables that impact performance of 239 registered firms in Sweden.We found that firms focusing on market competitiveness and growth orientation in their operations strategy showed better performance during the pandemic in comparison to firms focusing only on market competitiveness. It was also noted that it takes time to see the effects of changes in strategic priorities and depends on firms’ existing agility. However, the relation between firms’ performance during the pandemic and their status within the organization and ownership structure was unclear. It was also observed that ownership structure and firms’ status within the organization had no impact on the choice of perspective on operations strategy.Similarly, organizational attributes in terms of firms’ financial resources were found to have a positive impact on financial performance, and this relation was more prominent for firms with a wide span of control (horizontal structure) than for firms with a narrow span of control (vertical structure). While a negative relation between crisis conditions and financial performance was observed for firms with a narrow span of control, no such relationship could be observed for firms with a wide span of control. Similarly, no relation between firms’ intellectual resources and their financial performance was found in this study.This work provides evidence on how firms’ operations strategy and organizational attributes affect performance, particularly during COVID-19 pandemic-driven market changes. The findings provided in this work are relevant considering that the business environment is currently changing at an increasing pace. Additionally, the increased use of artificial intelligence, big data, the internet of things, and the platform economy has led us to a new industrial revolution, in which firms with efficient use of resources and processes are endowed with increased survival chances. The results of this thesis can provide insight into how organizations can optimize their resource usage and processes to achieve organizational agility for sustainable competitive advantages during future market changes.