The concept of supply chain resilience (SCRES) has come into renewed prominence during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology has changed the landscape of businesses and social life around the globe. Businesses have started harnessing advanced technologies to compete, survive and build resilience. In this paper, we study the changing nature of SCRES during the pre- and post-pandemic periods. We investigate the role of technology in business and also suggest to businesses the dynamics of achieving SCRES.
We use a systematic literature review (SLR) followed by a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). A total of 198 papers were reviewed. Initially, four sectors were chosen from the SLR approach to help develop SCRES. We further extend our qualitative analysis to understand common themes emerging from the four sectors. The QCA helps determine whether each theme, acting alone, or in conjunction with other themes, provides a sufficient or necessary condition for achieving SCRES.
Through the SLR, we identified four major sectors: manufacturing, human well-being, agriculture, and transport and logistics. A bibliometric analysis of existing data, further validated by network visualisation, revealed three major themes across the four sectors: technology, the human-technology interface and market-side performance. We find that, while all the three themes can support the development of SCRES and prepare supply chains (SCs) to tackle disruptions, interestingly, the combined support of technology and the human-technology interface becomes the most prominent, especially during the post-pandemic period. In parallel with technological developments in Industry 4.0, resilience has evolved from being a concept in the literature on supply chain risk management to becoming a holistic socio-economic property of the supply chain.
Our analysis found a significant increase in the role of technology and the role of the human-technology interface in achieving SCRES post-COVID-19 compared to the pre-COVID-19 period. This highlights the need to strengthen the development of appropriate modern technologies and ensure that human beings are adequately involved in the loop of the development and use of these technologies to manage resilience more effectively. Five research propositions have been developed to help future researchers.
This paper makes multiple contributions to the literature. This is one of the first studies to compare the pre- and post-pandemic literature on SCRES. Another contribution lies in the innovative use of SLR and QCA.
