Paths to Innovation in Supply Chains: The Landscape of Future Research

This chapter presents a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for supply chain and it is the result of an intensive work jointly performed involving a wide network of stakeholders from discrete manufacturing, process industry and logistics sector to put forward a vision to strengthen European Supply Chains for the next decade. The work is based on matching visions from literature and from experts with several iterations between desk research and workshops, focus groups and interviews. The result is a detailed analysis of the supply chain strategies identified as most relevant for the next years and definition of the related research and innovation topics as future developments and steps for the full implementation of the strategies, thus proposing innovative and cutting-edge actions to be implemented based on technological development and organisational change

The future of resilient supply chains

While supply chain resilience has been touched upon frequently, research remains (with the exception of often repeated anecdotal examples) relatively disparate on what disruptions actually are. This research aims to advance theoretical and managerial understandings around the management of supply chain disruptions. A two-stage research process is used which focuses first on polling academic experts. This stage is followed by the extraction of insights from practitioners in the automotive, electronics and food industries. Our findings coalesce around: (1) the types of disruptions that respondents are most concerned about; (2) the associated strategies suggested to cope with disruptions; and, (3) how resilience can be measured. It is apparent that there are some areas where academics and practitioners agree and others where they agree to a lesser extent. Both sets of actors tend to agree on how resilience can be quantified, with recovery time the preferred indicator. However, there is a discrepancy around how resilience is achieved within the supply chain. Academics emphasise the importance of redundancy while practitioners refer more to flexibility. Also, they disagree around what constitutes “key disruptions”: academics suggested high-profile events, while practitioners are more concerned with day-to-day problems

Resilience strategies and the pharmaceutical supply chain: the role of agility in mitigating drug shortages

NoSupply chain resilience has been suggested to curb the impact of disruptions on supply chains. While this proposition seems coherent in theory, empirical evidence supporting this is limited, as existing literature has centred on exploring the impact of supply chain resilience on disruptions which are based on set time frames, non-supply chain specific as well as examining non-dynamic disruptive events. This study contends that resilience strategies are dynamic and as such their applications within supply chains differ. Therefore examining the impact of resilience will be appropriate on a dynamic disruption within a specific supply chain. In view of this, the paper examines through existing literature the applicability of agility within the pharmaceutical supply chain when dynamic disruptions like drug shortages occur. The study finds alertness, accessibility, connectivity and visibility as dimensions of supply chain agility that are capable of reducing the impact of drug shortages