Building supply chain resilience in the digital era: insights from a multi-disciplinary perspective

Purpose To understand the concept of resilience defined across various disciplines of engineering, personal, psychological, people, ecological, social, community, family, urban, economic and retail contexts and to extricate the traits of resilience for supply chains in the present digital era. Design/methodology/approach We focus on the resilience theory and the dynamic capability theory, where a morphological analysis, followed by a resilience matrix analysis, is conducted to identify the critical traits of supply chain resilience. This approach considers the overall influence relations and the likelihood of being discussed among the practitioners. Findings We observe that risk management emerges as the most critical trait of supply chain resilience, as it has a very high level of influence over the other traits; as well, it is a trait that is much discussed among practitioners in the present digital era. This is closely followed by the traits of robustness, resistance, preparedness and persistence. Research limitations/implications Extending the resilience theory towards the supply chain resilience context, we identify that risk management and persistence emerge as the common traits of high importance, considering the results of both morphological analysis and risk matrix analysis. Hence, enhancing the risk management capabilities, as well as improving the persistence of supply chains, can improve resilience capabilities. Originality/value The article analyses resilience through multi-disciplinary perspective and recognizes 29 typical traits for supply chains, which are classified into 6 major groups based on the dynamic capability theory. Later, through a morphological as well as resilience matrix analysis, these traits were clustered into priority categories based on causality and likelihood of possible consideration by risk professionals.