Supply Chain Planning to Achieve Resilience Capabilities

Introduction

Supply Chain Management (SCM) has been a crucial part of every business organization since its emergence and it has evolved over the time. Recently, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Supply Chain (SC) has experienced unprecedented and significant disruptions (Siagian et al., 2021). This unexpected and sudden development on a global scale created a major disruption in SC in both up-stream and down-stream activities (Handfield et al., 2020). This disruption also compelled the managements of organizations to develop alternate plans to mitigate disruptions and risks in SC due to the current pandemic situation (Black and Glaser-Segura, 2020). With the latest technologies and methodologies, optimizing SCM by identifying the risks and developing a plan has become the utmost priority for any organization.

Risk management is an important issue in supply chain management as uncertainty of the occurrence of an event in one function of supply chain brings undesirable chain effect for the supply chain network (Finch, 2004; Tummala and Schoenherr, 2011). Supply chain risk has been defined as an unplanned and unexpected incident that disrupts the flow of goods or services within the supply chain literature (Scholten et al., 2019). Assessment of risks and development of risk management plans has gained utmost importance for achieving sustainability and resilience in SC during this pandemic. These plans will enable the organizations sail smoothly the pandemic situation with minimum impact of risks and disruptions. These plans also enable the organizations to regain quickly their original positions by successfully countering the negative impact of pandemic (Das, 2018). Therefore, planning towards SC resilience is the need of the hour for business organizations. Organizations attempt to achieve this resilience through diversified approaches. The evolution and emergence of digital technologies made this process easier for those organizations, which have implemented them proactively to manage their supply chains. However, due to many issues and challenges most of the organizations are unable to take advantage out of these technologies to plan their SC processes by integrating the technologies (Das and Lashkari, 2015). Moreover, some of the organizations are confused about how this integration takes place at the SC planning stage. With this background, this chapter attempts to identify the role of SC planning in achieving the resilience and provides some feasible solutions towards resilience.

Based on the above discussion, the chapter intends to address the following objectives and research questions.

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  How SC planning will lead to SC resilience especially during the pandemic?

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  How identification of risks and risk management plan will help achieve resilience in pandemic?

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  What are the existing models of SCR with integration of planning?

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  How SC planning through digital technologies supports the achievement of SC resilience?

A Comprehensive Literature Review (CLR) approach (Onwuegbuzie and Freis, 2016) has been adopted as the methodology for achieving the above objectives of the chapter. Using a set of key words, articles published in Emerald, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Proquest, and ResearchGate between 2000 to 2021 were considered.

Background

SC planning to achieve resilience is dependent and linked to many factors such as risk assessment, SC dependencies, SC visibility, vendor localization and preparedness for facing disruptive situations (Hendricks and Singhal, 2005; Juttner and Maklan, 2011; Black and Glaser-Segura, 2020; Gaur and Gaiha, 2020). Through a literature review, these factors are mentioned briefly here.