Supply chain resilience: A review, conceptual framework and future research

Abstract

Purpose

The study identifies nine important research areas and critically maps the structural relationships among supply chain resilience (SCRES) dimensions, namely, vulnerabilities, capabilities, strategies and performance metrics. The analysis also revealed various influential authors, journals, institutions and trending articles, across SCRES literature.

Design/methodology/approach

This study performs a bibliometric analysis of 771 articles published over the 32 years from 1988 to 2020, and network analysis in combination with content analysis of 90 most cited articles published in research fronts of SCRES.

Findings

The results demonstrate the underlying research areas within the SCRES, which are clustered into nine research themes: (1) conceptual development of SCRES, (2) recent developments of designing resilient supply chain (SC) networks, (3) focus on identifying drivers of SC vulnerability and risks, (4) impact of risks on network resilience, (5) risk assessment to avoid breakdowns/disruptions, (6) measuring resilience approaches/drivers to improve SC performance, (7) building resilient capabilities by integrating other SC dimensions, (8) quantification of SC network and (9) emphasis on developing robustness in SC networks.

Practical implications

This research offers implications for classifying the works in literature based on bibliometric information and network analysis techniques. This can help researchers and practitioners to understand the prominent areas in SCRES and provide guidelines for future research in this area.

Originality/value

This study provides an overview of the evolution of SCRES over time in the domain of supply chain management and also outlines a future research agenda claimed by the trending articles to encourage further investigations in the field of SCRES.