Adaptable solutions for retail supply chain resilience in the post-COVID-19 era

Abstract

Faced with globalization and unpredictable disruptions, firms aspire to achieve resilience and sustainable recovery of their supply chain (SC) networks. However, Nigerian retail firms are faced with challenges that deter resilience in their SCs under disruptions, and to date, literature is currently non-existent that analyzes these challenges and proposes strategies for their mitigation. This study, therefore aims to identify and analyze the degree of significance of the challenges to SC resilience in Nigerian retail firms under disruptions, as well as propose strategies to mitigate them for enhancing retail SC resilience under potential disruption risks in the post COVID-19 era. Nineteen challenges were identified and categorized into three contexts namely operational-level, macro-level and internal-level. Then, a methodology based on integrating decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory with the Shannon entropy concept and simple additive weighting was proposed to aid in the study analysis. Results indicate that the operational-level context is most significant and ranks highest in deterring SC resilience in Nigerian retail firms under disruptions. Specifically, 'limited credit facility' is the highest ranked challenge, followed by 'lack of Omni channel fulfilment capabilities', 'delivery irregularities', ‘workers’ high welfare package’ and 'lack of supplier collaboration’. Besides, 'incentivisation' mitigates these challenges the most and is strongest linked to build retail SC resilience, followed by 'digitalization' and ‘SC localisation'. Implications are highlighted from the results for retail SC resilience in the post-COVID-19 era.