Discontinuous Wefts: Weaving a More Interconnected Supply Chain Management Tapestry

Abstract

The COVID‐19 crisis quickly drew attention to shortages of critical supplies in complex, global healthcare, and food supply chains, despite emergency and pandemic plans existing in many countries. Borders and factories closed through lockdowns and slowly reopened under different working arrangements, causing supply chains to struggle to respond to this global crisis, with severe impact on GDPs internationally. Ironically, despite global communications technologies, global political structures, and the immense capability of humans, the only true global actor in this crisis is a virus, one of the simplest, most dependent forms of life. Supply chain management research and practice contains threads of knowledge and understanding that are vital to mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery in global crises; we just have not woven them together yet. This essay proposes a more interconnected approach to supply chain management to tackle these current and future global crises, weaving together understanding of supply markets, public procurement, humanitarian aid supply chain management, network and systems thinking, and global stewardship, with the more traditional conceptualizations of firm‐based supply chain management. Questions are posed to illustrate current discontinuous wefts of knowledge to explore how weaving a more interconnected, systems thinking‐based approach to supply chain management might stimulate research to support coordination of future global supply preparedness.

Guest editorial

“…The trade war between the US and China created tariffs that impacted the availability of supply capacity, which was further impacted by the prolonged Brexit negotiations (Handfield et al, 2020;Moradlou, et al, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic was not just a health crisis but also generally a supply chain crisis, with huge global impacts (Dolgui and Ivanov, 2021;Harland, 2021;Joglekar and Phadnis, 2021;Singh et al, 2021;Sodhi and Tang, 2021), including sudden changes in consumer buying habits, production delays and backlogs in industry, and causing simultaneously capacity shortages and slack capacity in global supply chains. Shipping of goods was prohibited or disturbed by closed country borders, limited availability of transport capacity and backlogs along the supply chain.…”

Exploring Progress with Supply Chain Risk Management during the First Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Control risks center around disruptions of internal control and governance systems. The dynamics of the pandemic may have caused the need to reconsider governance [5], implying that control risks may be high. Process risks are those risks related to the reliability of supply chain processes and they drive the need for visibility into bottlenecks and transparency of inventory positions.…”

“…Perhaps this can be explained by the dynamic nature of the risk scenarios and by the fact that respondents and case companies indicate that there is much more longer-term work ahead. However, it also implies that, perhaps counter to Harland [5], risk mitigation does not merely require weaving known and existing techniques together.…”

“…Fortunately, there are several risk mitigation techniques and strategies available from the literature (see for example [2][3][4]), including: inventory buffering, diversification of the supply base, digitization and supplier collaboration. It is said that the elements for building a more responsive supply chain are all there, but that they need to be better woven together [5], implying the need to focus on implementation and change management involved in responding to the pandemic. It should be noted, however, that the pandemic presents a unique set of circumstances, different from events in response to which existing techniques were developed [6].…”

Stewardship and administrative capacity in green public procurement in the Czech Republic: evidence from a large-N survey

“…In the public procurement literature, the problems of stewardship have been widely acknowledged in areas as diverse as the Covid recovery (Harland, 2021), social investment (Vluggen et al, 2020), and military procurement (Fourie, 2017). However, we suggest that in the Czech context, these problems are particularly exacerbated by the fact that the Czech public procurement system has traditionally been Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/CommonHTML/fonts/TeX/fontdata.js more formalistic compared to the older EU members (Plaček et al, 2020).…”