Can you measure resilience if you are unable to define it? The analysis of Supply Network Resilience (SNRES)

ABSTRACT

The increasing importance of resilience in supply chain management (SCM) has driven managers and scholars to seek ways to evaluate it. However, in the SCM literature, the conceptualisation of what resilience is and how supply chains are resilient in practice remains vague, which makes measuring it difficult. Based on an analysis of what resilience and being resilient means in different disciplines, combined with extant SCM literature about resilience, this paper clarifies the concept and posits that resilience, in the SCM context, is a process combining three interactive capabilities that operates at three intertwined levels of organisation: firm, supply chain and supply network. This multi-level analysis gives rise to a framework of overall supply network resilience (SNRES) that provides insights for both academics and practitioners and also leads to a useful analytical approach to evaluate resilience at different levels of a supply network.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• supply chain management
• supply network
• supply network resilience (SNRES)
• resilience capabilities
• conceptual paper

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Part of this work was supported by a grant from the French AFT-IFTIM group.

Notes on contributors

Yuan Yao

Yuan Yao is an assistant professor of supply chain management at HuManiS laboratory, EM Strasbourg Business School, University of Strasbourg (France) since 2015. She studied in Cret-Log Research Centre at Aix-Marseille University (France) and received her PhD of management science. She teaches logistics, supply chain management and wine SCM in Grande Ecole and Bachelor programs. Her current research interests include supply chain resilience, supply chain risk management and supply chain knowledge management. She is a member of International Association for Logistics and SCM Research (AIRL-SCM).

Nathalie Fabbe-Costes

Nathalie Fabbe-Costes is a full professor of management science at Aix-Marseille University (France) since 1994. She holds the direction of the CRET-LOG Research Centre since 2010. At the Faculty of Economics and Management, she teaches logistics, supply chain management, strategy and management information systems. Her current research focuses on the study of core SCM concepts such as supply chain integration/agility/resilience, traceability/visibility, and the study of plug-and-play/unplug mechanisms for temporary SCM. She has published more than 40 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, has been co-author or coordinator of more than 30 books, and has supervised 22 defended PhDs.