Viable supply chain model: integrating agility, resilience and sustainability perspectives—lessons from and thinking beyond the COVID-19 pandemic

By Dmitry A. Ivanov. Annals of Operations Research, 2020

1,123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Viability is the ability of a supply chain (SC) to maintain itself and survive in a changing environment through a redesign of structures and replanning of performance with long-term impacts. In this paper, we theorize a new notion—the viable supply chain (VSC). In our approach, viability is considered as an underlying SC property spanning three perspectives, i.e., agility, resilience, and sustainability. The principal ideas of the VSC model are adaptable structural SC designs for supply–demand allocations and, most importantly, establishment and control of adaptive mechanisms for transitions between the structural designs. Further, we demonstrate how the VSC components can be categorized across organizational, informational, process-functional, technological, and financial structures. Moreover, our study offers a VSC framework within an SC ecosystem. We discuss the relations between resilience and viability. Through the lens and guidance of dynamic systems theory, we illustrate the VSC model at the technical level. The VSC model can be of value for decision-makers to design SCs that can react adaptively to both positive changes (i.e., the agility angle) and be able to absorb negative disturbances, recover and survive during short-term disruptions and long-term, global shocks with societal and economical transformations (i.e., the resilience and sustainability angles). The VSC model can help firms in guiding their decisions on recovery and re-building of their SCs after global, long-term crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We emphasize that resilience is the central perspective in the VSC guaranteeing viability of the SCs of the future. Emerging directions in VSC research are discussed.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca9cc363dffd6616d867b2d8bd573d2cf81e20f0

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Citations in the corpus

Ripple effect in the supply chain network: Forward and backward disruption propagation, network health and firm vulnerability (2020, neutral): “For instance, the pandemic aused the operations suspension in China in February and March 020, which further disrupted US and European manufacturers and etailers because of supply shortage ( Ivanov, 2020a ; Thomas, 2020 ).”
A digital supply chain twin for managing the disruption risks and resilience in the era of Industry 4.0 (2020, background): “…SC collapses and adaptations amid the COVID-19 pandemic along with the analyses of post-pandemic recoveries provide indisputable evidences for the urgent needs of digital twins for mapping supply networks and ensuring visibility (Choi, Rogers, and Vakil 2020; Ivanov 2020a; Ivanov and Dolgui 2020).”
A case study on strategies to deal with the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic in the food and beverage industry (2020, background): “The impacts of these disruptions are severe, because such crises have long-lasting ripple effects and can impact the operations at multiple levels simultaneously, including sourcing, production, and distribution (Ivanov 2020a; see also Choi 2020; Ivanov 2020b; Ivanov & Dolgui 2020; Samson 2020).”
Supply chain disruptions and resilience: a major review and future research agenda (2021, background): “2019; Ivanov 2020b; Ivanov et al.”
The disruption of the international supply chain: Firm resilience and knowledge preparedness to tackle the COVID-19 outbreak (2021, neutral): “Recently, a few studies have tried to explore the effects of the pandemic disease on the disruption of global supply chains through means of simulation models (Ivanov, 2020a).”
Optimization of supply chain networks with inclusion of labor: Applications to COVID-19 pandemic disruptions (2021, background): “Ivanov (2020a) overviewed simulation-based research focusing on the potential impacts on global supply chains of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Impact of supply chain digitalization on supply chain resilience and performance: A multi-mediation model (2023, background): “Almost all global supply chains have encountered different levels of disruptions in operation, which have severely affected the production flow of companies (Paul et al., 2021; Ivanov, 2020; El Baz and Ruel, 2021).”
Supply Chain Viability and the COVID-19 pandemic: a conceptual and formal generalisation of four major adaptation strategies (2021, methodology): “Assuming different durations of pandemic control measures and propagation speeds of the pandemic across the continents, Ivanov (2020a) observed that the timing of the closing and opening of facilities at different echelons with some overlapping time windows was a major factor in determining the…”
Reconfigurable supply chain: the X-network (2020, positive): “Ivanov (2020) shows that differently than the traditional, linearly directed SCs with static structures, the firms in value webs may exhibit multiple behaviors by changing the buyer-supplier roles in interconnected or even competing SCs and causing dependence asymmetry (Dong et al. 2015).”
Analysis of resilience strategies and ripple effect in blockchain-coordinated supply chains: An agent-based simulation study (2020, positive): “One example is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has recently threatened global and inter-twined supply networks (Ivanov, 2020; Ivanov and Dolgui, 2020a).”
Researchers' perspectives on Industry 4.0: multi-disciplinary analysis and opportunities for operations management (2020, background): “0 can contribute to supply chain viability at a larger scale (Ivanov 2020; Ivanov and Dolgui 2020b).”
The Industry 5.0 framework: viability-based integration of the resilience, sustainability, and human-centricity perspectives (2022, background): “Ivanov (2020b) defines viability as an ‘ability of a supply chain tomaintain itself and survive in a changing environment through a redesign of structures and replanning of performance with long-term impacts’.”