Leveraging Digitalization to Strengthen Supply Chain Resilience: Mitigating Disruptions for Enhanced Performance

The COVID-19 pandemic and other global disruptions have emphasized the immediate necessity for enhanced resilience within supply chains, with digitalization emerging as a crucial enabler. Among the industries leading this shift, the manufacturing sector has increasingly adopted digital technologies to enhance operational visibility, responsiveness, and continuity. However, despite this advancement, there remains limited empirical clarity on how digital tools influence disruption handling, particularly under conditions of environmental uncertainty (EU). This study aims to fill this gap by presenting and empirically validating a conceptual model that explores the disruptions caused by digitalization of supply chains (DSC) and their effects on the fundamental resilience dimensions of absorption, response, and recovery. While digitalization may itself introduce new types of disruptions, such as cybersecurity risks, data integration challenges, and system failures, it simultaneously acts as a catalyst for resilience by enabling greater visibility, responsiveness, and predictive capability within the supply chain. This dual role emphasizes that digitalization can both challenge and strengthen resilience, depending on how effectively it is managed and integrated. The model also considers the moderating role of the EU. 200 supply chain experts, primarily from the manufacturing sector, were selected by stratified random sampling and given a structured questionnaire to complete. Findings reveal that DSC significantly improves disruption handling performance (DHP), with all three resilience capabilities acting as partial mediators. EU further moderates the relationship, highlighting the importance of contextual factors. This study provides significant insights by showing how supply chain performance and resilience in unstable situations may be improved by strategically leveraging digital transformation, particularly in the manufacturing sector.