Understanding Global Supply Chain & Resilience: Theory and Practice

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the last eight years of collaborative research of a global group of scholars on supply chain management and especially on how companies are dealing with uncertainties and disruptions. Starting with analyzing the factors that drive changes in global supply chain designs, this chapter describes how companies are coping with new types of disruptions such as trade conflicts, natural disasters, and pandemics. Commonly suggested resilience strategies like reshoring or regionalization are de-mystified and discussed based on first level insights from interviews and survey data. Moreover, we analyzed how companies have handled different types of disruption and the underlying efficiency-resilience trade-offs. The chapter then outlines the different types of complexity and obstacles to supply chain resilience that companies have to overcome based on their individual product characteristics, market environment, and supply chain setup. Finally, the need for measuring resilience is outlined and proposed resilience metrics are discussed.

Keywords: Global supply chain design, supply chain resilience, resilience metrics, implementation challenges, supply chain archetypes, supply chain survey, reshoring