Two views of supply chain resilience

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to explore adaptation-based and stability-based views of supply chain resilience to analyse what insights these different perspectives, individually and collectively, offer for theory and practice. In the stability-based view, resilience is triggered by disruptions and performance deviations to return to some ‘normal’ states. This view accounts for known-known uncertainty. The adaptation-based view shifts the focus from avoiding oscillations and recovering some stable states toward proactive adaptation and performance persistence. The adaptation-based view aims at designing structurally adaptable networks with process flexibility and actively used redundancy. It considers resilience from the value-creation perspective accounting for unknown-unknown uncertainties. Stability-based approach views resilience as an outcome or quantity. Adaptation-based approach considers resilience as a property or quality. A combination of stability- and adaptation-based approaches is imperative for building a strong supply chain immunity through an integration of general protection and adaptability. These approaches complement each other depending on the knowledge of and attitude to uncertainty by decision-makers. A combination of the two views helps consider resilience both as a quantity to measure how sick the supply chain is and to understand how the resilience comes about to ensure the quality of the network health and viability.

KEYWORDS:

• Supply chain resilience
• viability
• performance
• digital twin
• adaptation

Acknowledgements

I cordially thank four anonymous reviewers and the associate editor for their very helpful and constructive comments, which collectively provided me with a coherent direction in improving the manuscript through two revisions enriching the paper and my knowledge with many insights and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data supporting the findings of this study are available on a reasonable request from the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dmitry Ivanov

Dmitry Ivanov is a professor of supply chain and operations management at Berlin School of Economics and Law. He serves at the school as an Academic director of M.A. Global Supply Chain and Operations Management and B.Sc. International Sustainability Management as well as a Deputy Director of Institute for Logistics. His publication list includes around 400 publications, including over 130 papers in international academic journals and leading textbooks Global Supply Chain and Operations Management and Introduction to Supply Chain Resilience. His main research interests and results span resilience, viability and ripple effect in supply chains, risk analytics, and digital twins. Author of the Viable Supply Chain Model and founder of the ripple effect research in supply chains. Recipient of IISE Transactions Best Paper Award 2021, Best Paper and Most Cited Paper Awards of IJPR (2018,2019, 2020, 2021), OMEGA Best Paper Award 2022, Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher Award (2021, 2022). He co-edits IJISM and is an associate editor of the IJPR and OMEGA. He is Chairman of IFAC TC 5.2 ‘Manufacturing Modelling for Management and Control’.