## 4 Results--Case Study
### COVID-19 Period  
During the COVID-19 period (years 2020-2021), Company A had first to switch its activity towards the distribution of drugs and vaccines, which were the products most requested by the market. Those products need particular storage and transport conditions, and in particular, cold chain maintaining (from +2 \({}^{\circ}\)C to +8 \({}^{\circ}\)C). As those products were not among the kind of items originally treated by the Company, a preliminary (and important) step was to delineate appropriate procedures for drug and vaccine transportation. Those procedures defined the practices for not only the process (transport/storage) management, but also the tracing of the drugs/vaccines, and the administrative part (e.g., documents or labels). For instance, besides the legal requirements, the procedures also addressed aspects such as the share of the warehouse space or the loading/unloading bays among the drivers that arrived daily at the company's premises in the COVID-19 period. Obviously, with it not being feasible to increase the space available or the number of bays of the warehouse, the time available for loading/unloading operations was divided into more slots of one \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Industrial Sector** & **No. of Papers** \\ \hline Logistics & 9 \\ Food & 3 \\ Agri-food & 3 \\ Manufacturing & 2 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 5: Top five industry contexts with implications for e-commerce. hour, dedicated to some activities only. Because of the high request for shipments of vaccines and drugs, the company experienced a considerable and disproportionate increase in incoming/outgoing flows; hence, great efforts were made to cope with the increased volume of items handled, which, besides requiring the procedures described above, resulted in a change from 35 drivers to a peak of 58, observed in December 2020 (which later decreased by approx. 10 units in 2021). Despite the increase in the volume of items handled, only a few non-conformities were observed in 2020, such as four relating to outbound flows and one relating to inbound flows. Also, because of the pandemic emergency, efforts were made to sensitize customers towards the adoption of (simple) technological solutions intended to digitalize the transport process, such as electronic printing of bills or opening/closing of claims. In line with this, in the year 2020, Company A also updated the quality policy, to keep it aligned with the ISO 9001:2015 standards. From a commercial point of view, in 2020-2021 various activities which were in progress with some company's customers were blocked, because of limitations introduced (through legal regulations) on parcel size; this caused the loss of several customers. Overall, in 2020 the company worked with 14 customers, and with 10 customers in 2021; both figures show a decrease compared to the pre-COVID-19 period. Similarly, the company's administration changed as well in 2020-2021, with the displacement of some administrative staff; nonetheless, in 2021, the situation improved significantly compared to 2020, with the introduction of three new figures. As far as the volumes handled are concerned, as mentioned, the company experienced an increase in the volume of items treated in 2020, particularly evident in the lock-down period and in the months immediately after; that increase reached approx. +80% compared to 2019. To be more precise, the beginning of the year (January and February) showed volumes of products similar to those of the previous year, while from March 2020, the trend for items handled experienced a significant increase, which lasted for the whole lockdown period and decreased slightly later, even though it still remained higher than the average monthly movement of 2019, and then increased again during the second wave of the pandemic (fall/winter 2020). Overall, the average monthly volume was >50% higher than 2019; the peak was reached in December, with nearly +150% compared to 2019. The effects of the pandemic were also evident in 2021.