Achieving Supply Chain Resilience Through Smart Supply Chain Practices Leading to Circular Economy

Introduction

The concept of supply chain management (SCM) has gained lot of importance in business organizations and research areas due to its ability to develop capabilities required to achieve optimization of costs, improved product availability and increased customer satisfaction. However, today SCM has been facing many challenges due to a variety of disruptions, both external and internal. Highly competitive global scenarios, lack of knowledge in SCM, absence of proactive risk management plans (Manhart et al., 2020), unpreparedness of organizations and lack of long-term approaches towards SCM are some of the major reasons for these disruptions (Nadeesha et al., 2019). The current Covid-19 pandemic situation has been one such unprecedented disruption for SCM. It is not uncommon for SCM to encounter disruptions. SCM has witnessed such disruptions previously too. Some of those disruptions are external in nature and some other are internal ones caused due to coordination and cooperation issues in the internal processes of business organizations. Many of these disruptions impact the supply chain operations severely and they give very less time to respond. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify such disruptions, predict their possible impacts reasonably, develop a systematic risk management plan (Manhart et al., 2020) and create strategies to recover quickly. Economic recessions, health-related pandemic and epidemic situations, disruptions due to natural calamities and disruptions due to non-cooperation from other members of supply chain, geographic concentration of strategic suppliers in a single location are all some of the examples of external and internal disruptions posing challenges to the routine process flows of SCM (Ponomarov & Holcomb, 2009).

The concept of SCM has been evolving in the recent past to mitigate some of these disruptions with the help of technology and also by developing robust supply chain network (Park et al., 2021). However, there is a lot to be done in this area to successfully encounter the pandemic situations. Traditionally supply chains have been built on trust and mutual cooperation. But, the traditional supply chain suffers from many weaknesses resulting into excess production, excess storage of inventory and thus leading the entire system to produce more wastage. This wastage is also a result of excess buffer inventories, mismatch between supply and demand and lack of proper information sharing across the members of supply chain. This wastage directly and indirectly contributes to the global environmental problems being faced by the world, inspite of several efforts by nations to achieve the ‘circular economy’(herein after referred as CE) concept. A clear cut strategy by the members of supply chains across the world and by the policies and actions of business organizations, it is possible to transform the traditional supply chain to ‘smart supply chain’ to achieve the CE by taking advantage of applications of digital technologies. This chapter explores the concepts of supply chain resilience, role of digital technologies in the transformation of traditional supply to smart supply chain to achieve the concept of CE. The chapter develops a framework towards achieving CE through supply chain resilience with the help of digital technologies.

Considering the above discussion, the study proposes the following objectives.

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  To expand the knowledge of Supply Chain Resilience (SCR)

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  To examine the practices leading to SCR and Circular Economy (CE)

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  To analyze the role of digital technologies in enabling Smart Supply Chain

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  To develop a framework of SCR by integrating digital technologies

The remaining sections of this chapter will delve with the aspects related to the above objectives.