The role of technology in developing resilient supply chains: a systematic literature review during the COVID-19 pandemic and the disruptions of economic sanctions

What is it about?

The supply chain is vital in humanitarian and commercial operations, particularly in disaster relief operations, requiring efficient and timely emergency logistics to ensure medical needs are met. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and Russian economic sanctions have significantly impacted the current supply chain systems, leading to longer lead times, increased demand variability, and increased risks of supply chain disruptions, resulting in increased costs and missed deadlines. Technology plays a vital role in building a resilient supply chain, mitigating disruptive scenarios, and offering a new shift both in humanitarian and commercial supply chains. In this paper, we discussed the role of technology in reducing disruption impacts and developing resilient and sustainable supply chains for commercial and humanitarian purposes, focussing on current trends and future technological requirements. The systematic literature review adopted an established five-step review process to analyse and synthesise 40 articles out of 2,219 English-language articles published between January 2020 and September 2022. To build a resilient and sustainable supply chain, which is the ability of a firm to sense, adapt to, and quickly respond to the changes in supply chains, the adoption of diverse digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, big data analytics, additive manufacturing, cloud computing, and the internet of things, is essential. According to this study, most literature encourages organisations to adopt technologies that enhance their supply chains, thus improving their ability to resist shocks and adapt to unforeseen events. Our study highlights the potential of technology in enhancing supply chain resilience during disruptions, but also highlights a gap between technological advancements and performance, emphasizing resistance and recovery in humanitarian supply chains. During the COVID-19 pandemic disruption, technological features, such as information gathering, processing, sharing, visibility, transparency, collaboration, and tracking, reduced vulnerability in supply chains and enabled supply chain resilience. Adopting technologies in supply chain management systems requires affordability, adaptability, and assessment of capabilities, costs, and risks. Future research can guide integration, mitigate security risks through data protection measures, and explore technology standardization for resilient supply chains. Organizations should adopt and utilize it for strategic objectives. Humanitarian supply chains require emerging technologies like big data for reactive approaches, enhancing resilience and responsiveness. Digital technologies improve firm information processing, resilience, and flexibility in high-information-complexity environments. Managers should bring technology to the organisations that provide them with quality information sharing and collaborative decision-making capabilities for reactive approaches. Obtaining high-quality data is challenging, but technology can help. A robust infrastructure is needed for processing and converting data into meaningful information. Managers should consider a paradigm shift that could involve replacing the current supply chain systems with new technological features or hybridized systems (technology and humans) to make the supply chain system more resilient and sustainable. We hope that this work will assist practitioners in successfully adopting customised technology for creating and improving SCRs.

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Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash