Supply chain resilience: role of complexities and strategies

TLDR

The article examines how global sourcing complexities affect supply chain resilience and proposes proactive management strategies to mitigate these challenges. It introduces a global‑sourcing resilience framework that evaluates the impact of complexity factors on risk, innovation, sales promotion benefits, and responsiveness. The paper summarizes the special issue’s contributions and highlights their relevance for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and address complexities in global sourcing.

Abstract

This article introduces the relationship between complexities and proactive management practices in supply chain resilience, particularly due to global sourcing (GS) strategies. The main objectives of this paper are as follows: (i) explain the various aspects of GS rather than reporting the trends and implications described in the literature, (ii) view GS in terms of complexity theory and (iii) investigate the resilience of supply chain due to GS complexity and suggest strategies to overcome complexities. We propose a GS resilience framework for future researchers to analyse the impact of GS complexity factors on supply chain resilience with respect to three outcomes: (i) risk and innovation, (ii) benefit in terms of sales promotion and (iii) challenges and responsiveness. Based on the framework, this introductory article summarises the papers appear in this special issue. This article would be useful to researchers and practitioners to further explore the role of complexities, proactive management strategies on GS resilience.