Supply Chain Viability and the COVID-19 pandemic: a conceptual and formal generalisation of four major adaptation strategies

TLDR

The COVID‑19 pandemic has severely challenged supply chain viability and adaptation, yet literature on adaptation strategies and their impacts remains scarce. This study generalises four adaptation strategies—intertwining, scalability, substitution, and repurposing—to maintain supply chain viability during a pandemic and proposes a model to analyse and quantify their deployment and impact, while outlining future research questions. The authors combine literature analysis, case studies, and quantitative techniques to build a conceptual framework and formal model that align the four strategies with supply‑chain viability across ecosystem, network, and resource levels, formalising their deployment processes and outcomes.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged supply chains (SC) on an unprecedented scale testing viability and adaptation under severe uncertainty. However, the literature on the adaptation strategies and quantification of their impacts is still scarce. Mixing literature analysis, case study approach, and quantitative techniques for performance assessment under disruptions, our study generalises four adaptations strategies – intertwining, scalability, substitution, and repurposing – to maintain SC viability when facing a pandemic, and offers a model to analyse and quantify deployment and impact of adaptation. First, we analyse the recent literature and identify some of the general characteristics of adaptation strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We then describe case studies to illustrate the practical context and supplement the literature analysis in order to derive relevant determinants for building of a conceptual framework and construction of a formal model. In the conceptual framework, we show how the adaptation strategies can be aligned with the SC viability, encompassing the levels of the ecosystem, network, and resources. In the generalised model, we formalise the impacts and efforts in deploying and assessing the adaptation strategies as both a process and an outcome. We close by proposing some open research questions and outline several future research directions.