A Systematic Literature Review on Flexible Strategies and Performance Indicators for Supply Chain Resilience

Abstract Supply chain resilience is a widely useful concept for managing risk and disruption. Designing strategies for preparedness, response, and recovery can help businesses to mitigate risks and disruptions. Among them, flexible strategies can effectively improve supply chain resilience. In the literature, several studies have considered different types of flexible strategies and investigated their impacts on supply chain resilience. However, a systematic literature review (SLR) paper on this topic can further help to understand the scientific progress, research gaps, and avenues for future research. Hence, this study aims to explore how the literature has contributed to the area of flexible strategies and the impact on supply chain resilience performance. To achieve our objective, we apply an SLR methodology to identify themes such as research areas and key findings, contexts and industry sectors, methodologies, and key strategies and performance indicators in the connection between flexible strategies and supply chain resilience. The findings show that many studies connect flexible strategies to supply chain resilience. However, research gaps exist in analysing relationships between flexible strategies and performance, conducting comparative studies, developing dynamic resilience plans, applying flexible strategies, conducting theoretically grounded empirical studies, and applying multiple analytical tools to develop decision-making models for supply chain resilience. Finally, this study suggests several future research opportunities to advance the research on the topic. The findings can be a benchmark for researchers who are interested in conducting research in the area of flexible strategies and supply chain resilience.