An empirical analysis: Did green supply chain management alleviate the effects of COVID-19?

Supply chain management played a central role during the COVID-19 crisis, as the outbreak of the pandemic disrupted the majority of all global supply chains. This paper tests whether companies that use green supply chain management (GSCM) practices benefited from a buffer effect in the context of COVID-19. Our empirical analysis, conducted on a sample of U.S. companies, shows that GSCM companies experienced less negative abnormal stock returns during the crisis. This result contributes to the literature on financial impact of GSCM, finding that GSCM is perceived as an effective risk management tool and can serve as an effective drug against COVID-19 crisis. Our paper also contributes to the business debate on the role of green supply chains in the post-COVID19 world.     

Gaining from disorder: Making the case for antifragility in purchasing and supply chain management

The purchasing and supply chain management (P&SCM) discipline assumes that supply chains are fragile systems, hence taking a “negative” approach toward disorder. Building on Taleb’s concept of antifragility—the ability to gain from disorder rather than avoiding it—, we challenge this traditional assumption. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that some companies were indeed able to gain from disorder, whereas some of those that focused too much on robustness and resilience lost ground. Building robust and resilient supply chains may no longer be enough to thrive in today’s highly volatile business world. This article sparks a new debate by introducing antifragility to the P&SCM literature and provides new directions for future research.     

Risk management in humanitarian supply chain based on FMEA and grey relational analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the humanitarian supply chain management (HSCM) necessary for delivering emergency items during the disaster. The combined effects of climate change and the pandemic uncover the vulnerabilities of humanitarian supply chain operations and highlight the importance of risk management. This study aimed to identify priority risk factors and proposed mitigating risk strategies of a local government that is at the forefront of relief operations. It used Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) method to validate the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) approach in identifying priority issues relating to the supply chain risks. This paper reveals that the results of FMEA and GRA are almost similar.     

Improving agility and resilience of automotive spares supply chain: The additive manufacturing enabled truck model

The global supply chain disruption by the COVID-19 pandemic is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate as over 94% of the top 1000 fortune companies were badly affected. The need for building resilient supply chains to mitigate the effect of such disruptions is rising rapidly than ever before across the global business spectrum. Building resilience in the automotive spare parts (ASPs) supply chain is critically important as any disruption to automotive spares supply chain will affect the operations of the logistics sector, the backbone of global supply chains. This research work contributes to improving the resilience of the automotive spare parts supply chain by proposing a Viable Supply Chain (VSC) framework design that incorporates Additive Manufacturing (AM) enabled trucks in the automotive spares supply chain network. Based on the proposed model, conceptual case models are developed and tested with proposed AM enabled truck manufacturing closer to end customer. A heuristic approach called shortest time heuristic is also proposed to solve the routing and scheduling of an AM enabled truck to deliver customers’ orders of the spare parts through an online platform. Importantly, the study demonstrate how additive manufacturing can help the ASPs industry to switch from the existing practice of make-to-stock to a more efficient inventory management and cost saving make-to-order model while also achieving resilience and sustainability in by providing a source of spares support for discontinued models of vehicles.     

Strategies to develop a sustainable and resilient vaccine supply chain in the context of a developing economy

Developing a vaccine supply chain (VSC) is an intricate process due to product perishability issues and cross-border supply complexities. On top of that, developing a pandemic-driven VSC is more challenging due to having significant operational, infrastructural, and policy-related disruptions. From the perspective of a developing economy such as Bangladesh, handling the global COVID-19 pandemic through the proper establishment of a VSC has been disrupted by a multitude of organizational, economic, and policy barriers. This has hindered the process of establishing a resilient VSC let alone ensuring the sustainability of the supply chain (SC). Therefore, this study strives to identify the key VSC strategies and their interrelationships under four groups: Intra-organizational, Inter-organizational, Legislative, and Environmental, based on previous literature and the expert opinions of industrial practitioners and policymakers. 20 strategies are ranked, and their causal relationships are discussed using the fuzzy DEMATEL method. This study utilizes the fuzzy set theory to deal with the vagueness of human beings' perceptions, and the DEMATEL method to form a structural model to find out the cause (influencing and independent) and effect (influenced and dependent) relationships among different strategies. The outcome of this study shows that ‘developing local production facilities for vaccines’, ‘creating extensive governmental policy to ensure efficient distribution of vaccines’, ‘ensuring sustainable investment in vaccine manufacturing and distribution’, ‘integrating advanced data analytics for robust and resilient demand prediction’ and ‘promoting public-private-people partnership for sustainable investment’ are the most prominent strategies. The findings provide stakeholders and policymakers with a practical framework for developing a sustainable VSC prepared for any virus outbreak, such as COVID-19, while also achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).     

危化品物流智慧供应链影响因素及对策

从智慧供应链的角度,提出环境感知能力、资源整合能力、数据处理能力、技术支撑能力、信息共享能力等五个危化品智慧供应链影响因素,并作出研究假设,建立危化品物流智慧供应链影响因素模型,通过实证分析,进一步验证假设的正确性,基于研究结论,从整合供应链资源、运用先进物联网技术、提高供应链共享程度这三个方面提出对策建议。     

The sustainable humanitarian supply chain design: agility,adaptability and alignment

The sustainable humanitarian supply chain (SHSC) has been the subject of research and debate over recent years. The aim of the paper is to provide an SHSC definition, propose an SHSC structure and validate it empirically. A unique contribution of the present study is an attempt to delineate humanitarian supply chain (HSC) management from commercial supply chain management and further discuss the HSC from the point of view of sustainability. We identify three important characteristics of a HSC network: agility, adaptability and alignment, and further explore possible linkages using extant literature and interpretive structural modelling (ISM). We further test the constructs using confirmatory factor analysis. In this way we attempt to answer long-pending calls from past researchers to contribute to the existing theories of HSC and identify further research directions based on the limitations of the present study.     

Guest Editorial: A purchasing and supply management view of supply resilience for better crisis response

Purchasing and supply management (PSM) has been under great pressure since the COVID-19 pandemic first shook the world. Companies and public organizations faced new kinds of supply disruptions, and at a scale never seen before. New response abilities were required from PSM to address these challenges and disruptions. This Editorial introduces four articles in the Special Issue on “PSM learning from the pandemic: transforming for better crisis management.” These empirical contributions show how companies could build resilience to survive and be competitive during the COVID-19 pandemic. This Editorial discusses how supply resilience should be conceptualized in post-pandemic supply chains adopting a PSM perspective. We suggest that supply resilience practices should be developed and planned according to whether they strengthen existing supply chain relationships (bridging) or establish new ones (buffering) and whether they are short-term (temporary) or long-term (permanent) orientated. Furthermore, three supply resilience capabilities, absorbing, responding and capitalizing, should be prioritized in supply chains for responding to and recovering from global crises and disruptions. Supply resilience is key to crisis response and recovery, and PSM has an essential role in building and sustaining that resilience.     

Improving resilience of the healthcare supply chain in a pandemic: Evidence from Europe during the COVID-19 crisis

The severe scarcity of critical medical supplies caused by the COVID-19 pandemic led to considerable procurement challenges in the healthcare supply chain (HCSC). As ensuring the availability of such supplies during disruptions is critical, the debate on how to increase supply chain resilience in healthcare has gained new momentum. We present empirical evidence from a multi-tier case study spanning nine European medical supplies manufacturers and hospital groups. Based on the resource dependence theory, we investigated procurement-related strategies to improve medical supplies availability. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 39 procurement and supply chain management experts and derived seven propositions on buffering and bridging approaches for managing evolving resource dependencies and thereby strengthening supply chain resilience in a pandemic. Overall, we confirm the resource dependence theory's applicability for explaining companies' mitigation measures in a pandemic disruption. We find that bridging measures within the healthcare supply base, such as offering procurement support for suppliers or leveraging long-term buyer-supplier relationships, are more effective for securing medical supplies than buffering measures. Complementing bridging with buffering, such as extended upstream procurement or resource sharing among hospitals, can lead to superior risk mitigation as capacities of the present supplier base may not suffice. Furthermore, we extend the resource dependence theory by showing that the severity of disruptions caused by a pandemic triggers new forms of buffering external to the HCSC. Both traditional and new buffering measures establish novel flows of medical supplies in the HCSC that can enable higher supply security in a pandemic.     

A socio-economic optimization model for blood supply chain network design during the COVID-19 pandemic: An interactive possibilistic programming approach for a real case study

In uncertain circumstances like the COVID-19 pandemic, designing an efficient Blood Supply Chain Network (BSCN) is crucial. This study tries to optimally configure a multi-echelon BSCN under uncertainty of demand, capacity, and blood disposal rates. The supply chain comprises blood donors, collection facilities, blood banks, regional hospitals, and consumption points. A novel bi-objective Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is suggested to formulate the problem which aims to minimize network costs and maximize job opportunities while considering the adverse effects of the pandemic. Interactive possibilistic programming is then utilized to optimally treat the problem with respect to the special conditions of the pandemic. In contrast to previous studies, we incorporated socio-economic factors and COVID-19 impact into the BSCN design. To validate the developed methodology, a real case study of a Blood Supply Chain (BSC) is analyzed, along with sensitivity analyses of the main parameters. According to the obtained results, the suggested approach can simultaneously handle the bi-objectiveness and uncertainty of the model while finding the optimal number of facilities to satisfy the uncertain demand, blood flow between supply chain echelons, network cost, and the number of jobs created.     

Supply chain planning of vaccine and pharmaceutical clusters under uncertainty: The case of COVID-19

As an abrupt epidemic occurs, healthcare systems are shocked by the surge in the number of susceptible patients' demands, and decision-makers mostly rely on their frame of reference for urgent decision-making. Many reports have declared the COVID-19 impediments to trading and global economic growth. This study aims to provide a mathematical model to support pharmaceutical supply chain planning during the COVID-19 epidemic. Additionally, it aims to offer new insights into hospital supply chain problems by unifying cold and non-cold chains and considering a wide range of pharmaceuticals and vaccines. This approach is unprecedented and includes an analysis of various pharmaceutical features such as temperature, shelf life, priority, and clustering. To propose a model for planning the pharmaceutical supply chains, a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is used for a four-echelon supply chain design. This model aims to minimize the costs involved in the pharmaceutical supply chain by maintaining an acceptable service level. Also, this paper considers uncertainty as an intrinsic part of the problem and addresses it through the wait-and-see method. Furthermore, an unexplored unsupervised learning method in the realm of supply chain planning has been used to cluster the pharmaceuticals and the vaccines and its merits and drawbacks are proposed. A case of Tehran hospitals with real data has been used to show the model's capabilities, as well. Based on the obtained results, the proposed approach is able to reach the optimum service level in the COVID conditions while maintaining a reduced cost. The experiment illustrates that the hospitals' adjacency and emergency orders alleviated the service level significantly. The proposed MILP model has proven to be efficient in providing a practical intuition for decision-makers. The clustering technique reduced the size of the problem and the time required to solve the model considerably.     

工业物联网技术链、产业链、价值链互动机理研究

工业互联网是物联网的关键技术体系,可以实现工业设备的微型化、智能化、信息化和网络化。本文通过对工业互联网技术链、产业链、价值链的分析,研究了“三链”之间互动关系的机理;以电力、油气行业为案例分析工业互联网产业需求和技术供给情况,并对工业互联网的产业化提出相应的建议。     

物联网技术在家具供应链中的应用研究

物联网技术作为新一代信息技术,被认为是未来二十年新的经济增长点。文中借鉴美国将物联网技术应用于家具企业的成功经验,在对我国物联网技术在家具供应链方面的应用现状进行分析的基础上,提出让家具产品携带EPC代码的射频识别标签,可达到家具产品从原材料采伐、生产加工、仓储、运输、配送、销售的整个家具供应链过程进行可视化管理的目的,使得信息透明化,从而提高供应链的运作效率,降低运作成本。     

物联网技术在供应链管理中的应用

物联网是在计算机互联网的基础上,利用射频识别、电子产品编码、无线数据通信等技术,构造一个覆盖世界上万事万物的实物互联网。作者简要阐述了EPC技术和RFID系统的工作原理,分析了物联网技术在商品生产、运输、存储、配送和报关等环节的具体应用。目前,物联网技术在供应链管理中已得到了广泛的应用,随着技术的不断完善,它必将成为现代物流信息管理的核心技术。     

A data-driven decision support system with smart packaging in grocery store supply chains during outbreaks

The unexpected emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed how grocery shopping is done. The grocery retail stores need to ensure hygiene, quality, and safety concerns in-store shopping by providing “no-touch” smart packaging solutions for agri-food products. The benefit of smart packaging is to inform consumers about the freshness level of a packaged product without having direct contact. This paper proposes a data-driven decision support system that uses smart packaging as a smart product-service system to manage the sustainable grocery store supply chain during outbreaks to prevent food waste. The proposed model dynamically updates the price of a packaged perishable product depending on freshness level while reducing food waste and the number of rejected customers and maximising profit by increasing the inventory turnover rate of grocery stores. The model was tested on a hypothetical but realistic case study of a single product. The results of this study showed that stock capacities, freshness discount rate, freshness period, and quantity discounts significantly affect the performance of a grocery store supply chain during outbreaks.     

Integrating sustainability and resilience in the supply chain: A systematic literature review and a research agenda

Sustainability has emerged as an important industrial strategic outlook expanding beyond organizational boundaries to include the supply chain. Simultaneously, the industry has also been faced with supply chain resilience concerns. Research on the intersection of supply chain sustainability and resilience is nascent and is a consequence of their observed mutual influences. However, confusion about concepts, implementation methods, and measurements of sustainable and resilient supply chains remains. This study completes a systematic literature review that critically examines several major observations and directions. We find the concept of sustainable supply chains is more established, and general agreement on its theoretical foundations exists. Supply chain resilience is relatively less mature. The nexus and relationships between the two topics are often incoherent: there is confusion on sustainable and resilient supply chains establishment; there is no clarity on what practices could jointly advance both areas. A major conflict exists since sustainability generally focuses on efficiency, while resilience seeks effectiveness. We recommend studies to analyze implementation relationships and impact. We also observe that performance measurement systems should be developed to assess supply chain sustainability and resilience performance taking with explicit consideration time horizons considered in these measures.     

How can banks and finance companies incorporate value chain factors in their risk management strategy? The case of agro-food firms

A value chain framework for guiding the financial firms in their credit decisions is urgent, as the current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted, but missing in the extant literature, particularly for those that lend to industries sensitive to value and supply chain bottlenecks. This study creates knowledge in value chain finance, a big untapped and un-researched market. It constructs, confirms, and validates a value chain framework for assessing risks in lending to Agro and Food Processing firms in which value chain risks are major business concerns globally. To pursue the objectives of the study, we use a novel methodology that integrates the Modified Delphi technique, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and discriminant analysis. Based on testing and analysis of primary data, including loan data, a framework comprising six factors is proposed for use in conjunction with existing risk assessment models of finance companies to improve the quality of their credit decisions, contributing to their performance sustainability.     

Impact of epidemic outbreaks (COVID-19) on global supply chains: A case of trade between Turkey and China

COVID-19 has negative impacts on supply chain operations between countries. The novelty of the study is to evaluate the sectoral effects of COVID-19 on global supply chains in the example of Turkey and China, considering detailed parameters, thanks to the developed System Dynamics (SD) model. During COVID-19 spread, most of the countries decided long period of lockdowns which impacted the production and supply chains. This had also caused decrease in capacity utilizations and industrial productions in many countries which resulted with imbalance of maritime trade between countries that increased the freight costs. In this study, cause and effect relations of trade parameters, supply chain parameters, demographic data and logistics data on disruptions of global supply chains have been depicted for specifically Turkey and China since China is the biggest importer of Turkey. Due to this disruption, mainly exports from Turkey to China has been impacted in food, chemical and mining sectors. This study is helpful to plan in which sectors; the actions should be taken by the government bodies or managers. Based on findings of this study, new policies such as onshore activities should consider to overcome the logistics and supply chain disruptions in global supply chains. This study has been presented beneficial implications for the government, policymakers and academia.     

COVID-19 crisis and the efficiency of Indian banks: Have they weathered the storm?

The purpose of this study is to determine whether Indian banks were able to weather the COVID-19 storm. We estimate banks’ deposits-generating and operating efficiencies using a two-stage directional distance function-based network data envelopment analysis (DDF-NDEA) approach and seek to capture the immediate impact of COVID-19 on these efficiency measures by comparing their magnitudes in the pre-pandemic (2014/15–2019/20), just 1-year prior to the pandemic (2019/20), and during the pandemic year (2020/21) periods. The study looks at whether the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was uniform across ownership types and size classes. The empirical findings suggest that the Indian banking system was resilient and withstood the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the study period, however, the large and medium-sized banks experienced some efficiency losses. By and large, regardless of bank group, banks have shown resilience to the shock of the global health pandemic and improvements in efficiency.     

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business expectations

We document and evaluate how businesses are reacting to the COVID-19 crisis through August 2020. First, on net, firms see the shock (thus far) largely as a demand rather than supply shock. A greater share of firms report significant or severe disruptions to sales activity than to supply chains. We compare these measures of disruption to their expected changes in selling prices and find that, even for firms that report supply chain disruptions, they expect to lower near-term selling prices on average. We also show that firms are engaging in wage cuts and expect to trim wages further before the end of 2020. These cuts stem from firms that have been disproportionally negatively impacted by the pandemic. Second, firms (like professional forecasters) have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by lowering their one-year-ahead inflation expectations. These responses stand in stark contrast to that of household inflation expectations (as measured by the University of Michigan or the New York Fed). Indeed, firms’ one-year-ahead inflation expectations fell precipitously (to a series low) following the onset of the pandemic, while household measures of inflation expectations jumped markedly. Third, despite the dramatic decline in firms’ near-term inflation expectations, their longer-run inflation expectations have remained relatively stable.