Examples of good and bad practices of industrial companies in Slovakia to overcome the crisis situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Unpredictable changes in the business environment highlight the necessity for businesses to move towards agile management and business models. The period of the COVID 19 pandemic and the aftermath of restrictive anti-epidemiological measures have shown that the ability to be prepared to implement change, to react in a timely and effective manner to changes in the environment, which means being agile, is becoming an essential prerequisite for both survival and success. For this reason, we conducted research aimed at finding out how Slovak manufacturing enterprises coped with the changes caused by the pandemic COVID 19. The aim of the paper is to highlight examples of good and bad practices of industrial enterprises in the conditions of the Slovak Republic in overcoming the pandemic crisis situation through case studies. The method of semi-structured interviews with owners and top managers of representative manufacturing enterprises of individual industries was used to compile the case studies. The findings from the interviews were compared and linked to secondary data from the finstat.sk database of financial statements regarding the development of financial ratios before and during the pandemic. Based on the comparison of reactions, implemented changes and taken measures in enterprises with the change in financial indicators, we identified cases of good and bad practice. The results show that enterprises that took advantage of the newly emerging demand for new health goods and reoriented their production, as well as enterprises that digitized and optimized processes, achieved significantly better results in sales, profit and profitability than in the pre-pandemic period. Conversely, businesses that have sought only to cut costs by temporarily closing operations or reducing staff without optimisation measures and innovation have seen their financial situation worsen, run into losses and increased indebtedness.