Invited Comment‐Essay
From the Editors: Introduction to Managing Supply Chains Beyond Covid‐19 ‐ Preparing for the Next Global Mega‐Disruption
“The COVID‐19 pandemic has forced supply chain management researchers and practitioners to question many of our firmly held assumptions about the discipline. Perhaps the most interesting question is, where does supply chain management go from here? This issue of the Journal of Supply Chain Management begins to answer that question via a combination of invited essays and a regular submission. We consider this issue as only a starting point, and we hope to see its impact on future research on mega‐disruptions in supply chains.”
The full article can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jscm.12254
https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12254
“Large companies were concerned about their supply chains with environmental and social sustainability and disruption from natural disasters, conflict, and trade disagreements even before the advent of COVID‐19. The additional challenges presented by COVID‐19 in 2020 are “extreme” in being distinct from supply chain risk in that not just particular companies, but also entire societies are affected. Therefore, it is appropriate to rethink supply chain management (SCM) for research and practice to cope with extreme conditions, now and in the future, whether due to pandemics, war, climate change, or biodiversity collapse. In this essay, we first present the widespread challenges, along with some of the responses. We then list research opportunities for supply chain management in extreme conditions. These opportunities pertain to retailers' survival in the face of highly successful e‐commerce giants and the mixed use of robots and human workers. There are also opportunities to share supply chain capacity in distribution and coopetition regarding medically necessary items such as anti‐virals or vaccines. The growing role of government in supporting business, including the creation of industry commons, also presents avenues for further research.”
The full article can be found here:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jscm.12255
https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12255
Original Article
“The COVID‐19 pandemic has illustrated the broad and diverse challenges that supply networks face in preparing for and adapting to significant supply and demand disruptions. While much has been written about resilience strategies, few consider resiliency from a network level perspective. In this essay, we explain a typology of resiliency strategies linked to different types of collaboration within and between supply networks. Existing literature focuses on two of these types, micro‐ and macro‐level supply network resilience. Micro‐level resilience occurs when buyers and suppliers coordinate directly on supply risk prevention and recovery. Macro‐level resilience occurs when corporations, including competitors, collaborate with institutions such as government or trade associations to manage or regulate longer‐term supply risks. This essay identifies a third type, meso‐level resilience. Meso‐level resilience emerges when multiple supply networks collaborate on short‐ to medium‐term supply risks. These collaborations tend to be more opportunistic and ad hoc than micro‐ or macro‐level collaborations, and we argue that they can be viewed as complex adaptive systems, exhibiting self‐organization and dynamism. We identify a number of novel characteristics of meso‐level resilience and discuss research implications.”
The full article can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jscm.12256
https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12256
Invited Article
We talked to Christine Harland about her research entitled “Discontinuous wefts: Weaving a more interconnected supply chain management tapestry”
“The COVID‐19 crisis quickly drew attention to shortages of critical supplies in complex, global healthcare, and food supply chains, despite emergency and pandemic plans existing in many countries. Borders and factories closed through lockdowns and slowly reopened under different working arrangements, causing supply chains to struggle to respond to this global crisis, with severe impact on GDPs internationally. Ironically, despite global communications technologies, global political structures, and the immense capability of humans, the only true global actor in this crisis is a virus, one of the simplest, most dependent forms of life. Supply chain management research and practice contains threads of knowledge and understanding that are vital to mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery in global crises; we just have not woven them together yet. This essay proposes a more interconnected approach to supply chain management to tackle these current and future global crises, weaving together understanding of supply markets, public procurement, humanitarian aid supply chain management, network and systems thinking, and global stewardship, with the more traditional conceptualizations of firm‐based supply chain management. Questions are posed to illustrate current discontinuous wefts of knowledge to explore how weaving a more interconnected, systems thinking‐based approach to supply chain management might stimulate research to support coordination of future global supply preparedness.”
The Full Article can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jscm.12249
https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12249
Invited Comment‐Essay
“The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) outbreak affects not just populations but also global and local economies and supply chains. The outbreak itself has impacted on production lines and manufacturing capacities. In response to the outbreak, policies have been put in place that blocks the movement of people and materials, causing supply chain disruptions. Mainstream supply chain management has been at a loss in responding to these disruptions, mostly due to a dominant focus on minimizing costs for stable operations, while following lean, just‐in‐time, and zero‐inventory approaches. On the other hand, pandemic response supply chains, and their related supply chain disruptions, share many characteristics with disaster response and thereby with humanitarian supply chains. Much can thus be learned from humanitarian supply chains for managing pandemic‐related supply chain disruptions. What is more, facing, and managing, supply chain disruptions can be considered the new norm also in light of other disruptive forces such as climate change, or financial or political crises. This article therefore presents lessons learned from humanitarian supply chains that help mitigate and overcome supply chain disruptions. These lessons not only relate to preparedness and mobilization, but also relate to standardization, innovation, and collaboration. Together, they brace organizations, supply chains, and societies, to manage current and future disruptions.”
The full article can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jscm.12253
https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12253
Keep an eye out for the above research featuring in an upcoming Spotlight
“The daunting effects of COVID‐19 have motivated large firms to rethink supply chain designs and practices. As a potential contribution to such change, we introduce the concept of supply chain entrepreneurial embeddedness (SCEE), which we define as the degree to which a large firm integrates small entrepreneurial business capabilities (e.g., creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, rapid decision‐making, and swift execution) within its supply chain. We theorize that SCEE can be realized via at least three mechanisms—acquiring (i.e., purchasing one or more small entrepreneurial firms), allying (i.e., building cooperative alliances with such firms), and assimilating (i.e., mimicking how such firms behave). We suggest that SCEE is valuable under normal conditions, but its value increases under duress. Grounded in the concepts of structural inertia, requisite variety, mutualism, and real options, our core premise is that SCEE enables large firms to better navigate multiple and multidirectional concurrent changes in supply and demand, which in turn enhances firm performance. We contextualize this core premise by theorizing that greater end‐user proximity (wherein SCEE is located close to the final customer) and service centricity (wherein competition is primarily based on the service dimension of product–service bundles) enhance SCEE’s positive effects.”
The full article can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jscm.12251
https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12251
Keep an eye out for the above research featuring in an upcoming Spotlight
Original Article
We talked to Andreas Wieland about his research entitled “Dancing the Supply Chain: Toward Transformative Supply Chain Management”
“Most of the theories that have dominated supply chain management (SCM) take a reductionist and static view on the supply chain and its management, promoting a global hunt for cheap labor and resources. As a result, supply chains tend to be operated without much concern for their broader contextual environment. This perspective overlooks that supply chains have become both vulnerable and harmful systems. Recent and ongoing crises have emphasized that the structures and processes of supply chains are fluid and interwoven with political‐economic and planetary phenomena. Building on panarchy theory, this article reinterprets the supply chain as a social–ecological system and leaves behind a modernist view of SCM, replacing it with a more contemporary vision of “dancing the supply chain.” A panarchy is a structure of adaptive cycles that are linked across different levels on scales of time, space, and meaning. It represents the world’s complexities more effectively than reductionist and static theories ever could, providing the basis for transformative SCM.”
The full article can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jscm.12248
https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12248