Advancing on the scientific frontier in logistics and supply chain management in 2021 at the RIRL 2020 conference

The 2020 conference on Research in Logistics and Supply Chain Management (RIRL 2020) was held during the Covid-19 crisis, in the midst of two lockdowns and at a time when transport was highly restricted across Europe. Nonetheless, the conference that was postponed from May to October took place in the port city of Le Havre (Le Havre Normandy University), on a mixed mode. Adjusting to national recommendations, we were able to benefit from faceto-face presentations and from distance presentations as well as from ordinary conference lunches and dinners (without masks but with hydro-alcoholic gel). Seventy papers were presented in English and French by researchers coming from across the world, mainly from Europe, North and South America. This special issue of Supply Chain Forum: An International Journal presents four papers. Six papers were initially selected by the scientific committee among papers presented in English at the conference, and four were able to go timely through the publication process. It was too early at the time to benefit from research results on how the pandemic disrupted supply chains and to draw scientific knowledge from the experience. However, the conference called researchers to go across and beyond existing boundaries as shifts in business patterns already challenged Supply Chain Management (SCM). Besides still improving findings on key supply chain topics, by all means, we went beyond frontiers when exploring food supply chains in Ethiopia or international assistance in Syria. Moreover, in a world confronted with radical changes, logistics and SCM research must help professionals navigate in the upcoming settings and provide guidelines. Sustainability and automation are two major issues that call for new supply chain models and renewed thinking. While automation and digitisation (sensors, real-time measurement, data collection and analysis, algorithms) are generally viewed as sustainability enablers (Sanders et al. 2019; Ghobakhloo, 2020), each field still has specific impacts on the supply chain.