Supply chain resilience and its interplay with digital technologies: making innovations work in emergency situations

Abstract

Supply chain resilience and its interplay with digital technologies: making innovations work in emergency situations Resilience in supply chains is as vital for firms as immune systems are for human beings. Immune systems continuously monitor, anticipate and adapt to dynamic environments. Similarly, resilience capabilities in supply chains (SC) enable recovery and adaptation when the SC are exposed to and affected by changes in environmental and operational factors (MacCarthy et al., 2016). One such significant and rapidly emerging change is digitalization in firms and in society (Richey et al., 2016, Ivanov et al., 2019c; Panetto et al., 2019). Supply chain resilience (SCR), as a capability, is both challenged and enhanced by digitalization. Although the concept of resilience in supply chain management (SCM) is not new (Pettit et al., 2010; Blackhurst et al., 2011; Brandon-Jones et al., 2014; Hohenstein et al., 2015; Chowdhury and Quaddus, 2017; Hosseini et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2020), ongoing developments in digital technologies have been introduced fairly recently in the field of SCR and have not yet been well explored (Papadopoulos et al., 2017; Dubey et al., 2021; Ivanov et al., 2019a, b; Queiroz et al., 2019; Brintrup et al., 2020; Lohmer et al., 2020; Ralston and Blackhurst, 2020). Innovations in digital technologies influence the development of new paradigms, principles and models in SCM in general, and SCR in particular. We consider digital technology as a combination of Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence, advanced tracking and tracing technologies, wearables and additive manufacturing (Baryannis et al., 2019; B€ uy€ uk€ozkan and G€oçer, 2018; Ben-Daya et al., 2019; Ivanov et al., 2020; Frazzon et al., 2021). Accompanying such technological advances in managing SCR are similar advances in organizational practice and culture, involving the socio-technical aspects of new technology use. Moreover, the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) virus and the associated global pandemic showed that firms with an extensive utilization of digital technologies could operate with more resilience due to enhanced visibility and co-ordination (Ivanov, 2020a; Ivanov and Das, 2020; Queiroz et al., 2020). The interplay of SCR and digital technologies can be considered in light of three dimensions.