Towards the viable supply chain: Managing targets across efficiency, resilience, and sustainability

Swiss companies that want to remain globally competitive are caught in a multi-layered tension between efficiency, resilience, and sustainability. Megatrends such as climate change and resource scarcity, as well as the resulting disruptions that affect both the global and Swiss economies, necessitate a holistic view to think long-term while at the same time being prepared for unexpected events that occur in the short term. The efficiency-focused paradigm is no longer a blind recipe for success. Lean supply chains can incur enormous costs in a short time if disruption happen at some point in the chain. The targets of the efficiency paradigm clash against the requirements of resilience and sustainability in the supply chain. Recent research shows that the simultaneous consideration of resilience, sustainability and efficiency is essential to achieve 'Supply Chain Viability' (SCV) (Hofmann and Langner 2020). To study and elaborate such SCV, it is a crucial element to ensure the integral consideration of all three objectives to achieve it.The goal of this research project is to develop a concept of SCV that incorporates resilience, efficiency, and sustainability into the overall consideration. Therefore, the research project is divided in two sections: First, the scientific work on supply chain viability. This section consists of three work packages (WP) and the major deliverable will be a model to measure and verify the supply chain viability on a industry sector or company granularity. Second, the practical aspect consisting of two WPs. In the end of this section, the major deliverable will be a management guideline for practitioners to successfully improve SCV through precise projects embedded in a holistic context. In addition, the proposal addresses the need to develop resilient, sustainable supply chains in the context of current COVID-19 pandemic disruptions (Choi, Rogers et al. 2020) and long-term climate change challenges (Azadegan and Dooley 2021). This research addresses the need to balance efficiency, resilience, and sustainability in supply chain management (SCM), and from this, shape a new, contemporary paradigm for SCM (Wieland, Handfield et al. 2016, Liu, Zhu et al. 2020). This new paradigm allows executives to improve their business in the form of a management guide. In pursuit of this goal, the research team, including Erik Hofmann (grant applicant), Daniel Langner, Laurin Zemmrich (University of St.Gallen, Switzerland), and the project partners Thomas Choi (Arizona State University, USA), Alexandre Dolgui (IMT Atlantique, France), and Donna Marshall (University College Dublin, Ireland) aims to answer five guiding research questions:RQ1: What concept aligns efficiency, resilience, and sustainability in supply chain management? RQ2: What are the critical conflicting or aligned targets of resilience, sustainability, and efficiency and their interdependence in terms of supply chain viability?RQ3: How can supply chain viability be modelled and operationalized?RQ4: How can purpose setting contribute to achieve a higher level of supply chain viability?RQ5: What are practical pathways to implement supply chain viability?The research team intends to follow a design science research approach that includes relevance, rigor, and design cycles. Within the WPs, the team will use a variety of methods, including survey research, expert interviews, Delphi studies, and literature reviews to develop theoretical and managerial contributions. In the evaluative phases of the research, the team will rely on expert interviews. The results of the research project will be published in leading peer-reviewed journals and will be presented on high ranked international conferences.