Bespoke Supply Chain Resilience: The Gap between Theory and Practice

Abstract

Recent research has documented that companies are pursuing a variety of strategies to enhance supply-chain resilience. This paper examines how managers actually think about resilience strategies, and then analyzes the relationship between operations, supply-chain characteristics, and the implemented strategies.
We define a “Triple-P” framework that matches resilience strategies to supply-chain archetypes by examining Product, Partnership, and Process complexity based on interviews of senior supply-chain executives. These interviews revealed two major influencers of resilience strategy, i.e., Homogeneity of internal supply-chain processes and Integration with other actors in their end-to-end supply chains. We found that the supply chains have different resilience requirements, have different ways to achieve resilience (which we conceptualize as “bespoke supply-chain resilience”), and face different obstacles to resilience. This study aims at initiating a dialogue between supply-chain scholars and practitioners to support more research for developing an effective supply-chain resilience strategy.

Keywords: Supply chain resilience, supply chain segmentation, supply chain integration, supply chain archetypes, grounded theory

JEL Classification: L10