This study aims to examine how knowledge management (KM) and big data analytics (BDA) combine, individually and conjunctively, to shape supply chain resilience (SCR) and responsiveness among free zone manufacturing firms. Anchored in dynamic capabilities theory (DCT), it argues that KM and BDA represent complementary sensing and reconfiguring capabilities whose configurational interaction determines supply chain performance outcomes.
A cross-sectional survey was administered to 205 free zone manufacturing firms in Ghana. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and crisp-set QCA (csQCA) were employed as the primary analytical tools, enabling examination of necessity, sufficiency and causal asymmetry across capability configurations.
BDA alone is sufficient for responsiveness, while SCR requires the conjunctural presence of both KM and BDA. Supply chain flexibility and visibility function as near-necessary background conditions for SCR rather than discriminating sufficient drivers. Critically, the absence of any two core capabilities is associated with conditions sufficient for SCR failure, confirming causal asymmetry between resilience success and failure pathways.
Managers seeking responsiveness gains may prioritise BDA investment independently. Achieving SCR, however, demands simultaneous and coordinated investment in both KM and BDA. Partial capability configurations carry active resilience risk rather than merely representing suboptimal resource allocation.
This study makes three contributions. It advances DCT by mapping KM and BDA onto distinct sensing-seizing-reconfiguring functions at the supply chain level. It introduces causal asymmetry as a theoretically necessary dimension of supply chain capability research. It extends DCT’s boundary conditions to Sub-Saharan African free zone manufacturing, a context absent from the extant configurational literature.
