Resilience in the Supply Chain

Supply chain resilience is vital to long-term viability of firms. Supply chain design and operation conditions will influence their survival during major crises. While most firms have focused on how to quickly recover from disruptions, resilience is more than quickly overcoming a natural disaster that destroyed part of their facilities. Resilient firms are also capable of adapting to new operating contexts as a result of unexpected changes or disruptions. Supply chain resilience is better defined by the integration of two main historical approaches: engineering resilience and social-ecological resilience. Traditional resilience practices with a focus on mitigating disruption impact seem insufficient in the current landscape. This chapter presents a comprehensive understanding of supply chain resilience. We introduce supply chain disruption definitions and discuss why these unexpected events are central to the current operating environment. The understanding of resilience in the current context leads to the development of a framework that integrates the necessity of both proactive designs and reactive deployments of supply chain elements. The chapter categorizes and details a set of practices that companies should holistically implement to deal with unexpected events. The concepts presented are reinforced with numerous practical examples, so they are easy to understand for professionals and students with different backgrounds.