Supply Chain Management: An International Journal

Achieving supply chain resilience: the role of procurement

Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher, Andrea Lago Da Silva,
Article information:
To cite this document:
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher, Andrea Lago Da Silva, (2014) "Achieving supply chain resilience: the role of
procurement", Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, Vol. 19 Issue: 5/6, pp.626-642, https://doi.org/10.1108/
SCM-09-2013-0346
Permanent link to this document:
https://doi.org/10.1108/SCM-09-2013-0346
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)

Downloaded on: 25 October 2017, At: 08:05 (PT)

References: this document contains references to 88 other documents.
To copy this document: permissions@emeraldinsight.com
The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 4560 times since 2014*
Users who downloaded this article also downloaded:
(2013),"The influence of relational competencies on supply chain resilience: a relational view", International Journal
of Physical Distribution &amp; Logistics Management, Vol. 43 Iss 4 pp. 300-320 <a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/
IJPDLM-08-2012-0243">https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPDLM-08-2012-0243</a>
(2014),"The role of demand management in achieving supply chain agility", Supply Chain Management: An International
Journal, Vol. 19 Iss 5/6 pp. 577-591 <a href="https://doi.org/10.1108/SCM-10-2013-0363">https://doi.org/10.1108/
SCM-10-2013-0363</a>

Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by emerald-srm:534317 []
For Authors
If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service
information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit
www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information.
About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com
Emerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of
more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online
products and additional customer resources and services.
Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics
(COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.

*Related content and download information correct at time of download.

 Achieving supply chain resilience: the role of
procurement
Carla Roberta Pereira
Department of Industrial Engineering, Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil
Martin Christopher
Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, Cranfield, UK, and
Andrea Lago Da Silva
Department of Industrial Engineering, Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil

Abstract
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of procurement in identifying and managing the intra- and inter-organisational issues
which impact supply chain resilience. Achieving resilience along the supply chain in today’s turbulent business environment requires efforts from both
internal and external elements of the extended enterprise.
Design/methodology/approach – The systematic literature review was conducted between 2000 and 2013 with the objective being to answer the
single research question proposed. To do so, a content analysis based on the literature was applied to 30 selected papers.
Findings – The study revealed that procurement activities do make a significant contribution to creating supply chain resilience. Emerging from the
literature review, certain intra- and inter-organisational issues were identified that could impact supply chain resilience. Also the possible actions
that procurement could take to enable the enhancement of supply chain resilience were identified.
Research limitations/implications – This study is limited, in that it is exploratory and focuses only on the body of knowledge presented in two
databases over the past 13 years. It has also been restricted to the procurement function and the consequent implications for the upstream supply
chain.
Originality/value – The originality of this paper lies in the identification of intra- and inter-organisational issues from a procurement perspective
specifically as they relate to improving supply chain resilience. This raises further questions on the role of procurement in creating supply chain
resilience, which has not been well-explored in the current literature.
Keywords Procurement, Supply chain resilience, Systematic literature review, Disruptions
Paper type Literature review

Blocking motorways throughout this week, Brazilian protests have impacted
the logistics companies’ operations, in the sense that they had problems
delivering their loads on time [. . .]. The production lines of some
automakers have already been interrupted, and the fuel distribution is also
a concern (ILOS, 2013; via Valor Econômico, July 2013).
1. Current global market and environmental
issues
According to the Brazilian Institute of Logistics and Supply
Chain (ILOS), the current protests against the Brazilian
government in June 2013 blocked hundreds of roads in
various areas across the country. As a result of this major
event, the normal flow of deliveries from logistics companies
came to a halt, and international companies placed in Brazil,
such as Fiat and Volkswagen, experienced mishaps in their
manufacturing operations. Because of the increasing
interconnections among companies, the major reason for the
growing number of supply chain disruptions has been the
network complexity in the current global sourcing scenario.
And although it has been highlighted to improve product
quality, enhance customer value and reduce cost in general
(Wagner and Bode, 2006; Stecke and Kumar, 2009), any type
of disruption in the flow of goods may have an impact on all
interconnected companies along the supply chains
(Blackhurst et al., 2005; Christopher and Holweg, 2011).
In addition to this concern, the trend to high demand
variability and the short life of products, and the different
expectations and requirements of customers have impacted
the supply chain’s operations causing them to become more
unstable and unpredictable. Thus, the operations of
companies and their supply chains are no longer as stable as
previously. The global business environment has changed and
is currently subjected to a multitude of events from a variety of
sources, such as natural disasters, social conflicts, economic
crises and manufacturing failures. The World Economic

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1359-8546.htm
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
19/5/6 (2014) 626 –642
© Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 1359-8546]
[DOI 10.1108/SCM-09-2013-0346]
The authors are grateful to the financial support granted by CAPES
(Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate
Education) and FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation) through the
processes no. 2009/05160-0 and no. 2011/06008-8.
Received 26 September 2013
Revised 23 December 2013
Accepted 12 January 2014

626
 Achieving supply chain resilience
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva
Forum (2013) has recently released the top five disruptions
that occurred in 2012, and natural disasters is the first of them
followed by extreme weather, conflict and political unrest,
terrorism and sudden demand shocks.
Normally, arising from internal, external or environmental
sources, risk may have an impact on companies and on their
supply chains due to the lack of flexibility, information sharing
or capacity, for instance Stecke and Kumar (2009) and
Carvalho et al. (2012a). These drawbacks are even more
impactful when analysed from the perspective of the global
network. Thereby mitigating impacts arising from any type of
risk, supply chain resilience aims to help companies cope with
different types of disruptions in a rapid way, enabling
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
operations to be restored to the previous performance level or
even to a new and better one (Christopher and Peck, 2004).
Achieving resilience along the supply chain requires effort
from internal actions within the business and from the wider
network. Although causes from disruptions may arise from
any element of the supply chain, it is observed that supply
disruptions are more critical when they occur upstream in the
chain. For this reason, procurement has become a critical
business activity by being considered a boundary spanning
function, where it is responsible for sourcing decisions and
acts as a bridge between internal and external enterprises.
In this context, such critical events and their impact on
companies’ performance have vividly demonstrated the recent
need for changes regarding traditional strategies. It has
motivated researchers and practitioners to increasingly explore
how companies can overcome impacts arising from sudden
and unforeseen events by means of resilient practices (Yi et al.,
2011). Although some researchers (Zsidisin and Wagner,
2010; Blackhurst et al., 2011; Bode et al., 2011; Carvalho
et al., 2012a,2012b) have explored ways to better cope with
untoward events and the consequent unplanned outages,
scant attention has been paid to investigating relevant issues
orientated to the enhancement of resilience capabilities in
companies. Particularly, intra- and inter-organisational issues
from activities which are responsible for managing the flow of
goods and information in the upstream supply chain. This,
therefore, raises questions on the role of procurement in
creating supply chain resilience, which have not been explored
in depth so far in the literature. Also taking into consideration
any type of untoward event and not only disruptions arising
from extreme and natural disasters, which are the most often
referenced cause of disruption in the literature. To address this
gap, the purpose of the paper is to understand the role of
procurement in identifying and managing the intra- and
inter-organisational issues which impact supply chain resilience.
To do so, a systematic literature review was applied as a research
method.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows.
Initially, it briefly contextualises the two main topics in this
study – supply chain resilience and the procurement
function – followed by a systematic literature review. The
findings are summarised and the role of the procurement
function in enhancing resilience is discussed. Finally,
conclusions are drawn based on the results reached along with
a number of propositions for further research derived from the
limitations of this study.
627
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642
2. What is supply chain resilience?
Previously, resilience was not a well-known concept in the
business’ world, and to some extent, its meaning is still limited
to a minority of researchers and practitioners within the supply
chain management field. This concept has emerged from a
fusion of disciplinary concepts and ideas which began in
material science to describe the capacity of a material to
bounce back to its original shape after any deformation
(Sheffi, 2005). Because of its wide application to different
subjects, such as ecology, psychology, economy, social and
organisational approaches, resilience has become a
multidimensional and multidisciplinary phenomenon in the last
40 years (Ponomarov and Holcomb, 2009).
In the business environment, the tipping points for
acceptance of the resilience concept were the tragic events
such as the UK fuel protest in September 2000, the foot and
mouth disease in February 2001 in the UK and the US
terrorist attack in September 2001 (Christopher and Peck,
2004). As a result of these featured events, managers
concerned about further threats were forced to think of
alternative ways to develop strategies for preventing and
coping with different types of disruptions. At this point in
time, researchers have seen this topic as a great opportunity to
explore business continuity and competitive advantage.
Since these events, a rich and growing body of literature on
this topic has emerged. Figure 1 illustrates the growing
number of studies covering the 13-year period; however, this
amount is still very small in comparison with the wide
literature in supply chain management. For this reason,
resilience is still considered by many scholars (Christopher
and Peck, 2004; Ponomarov and Holcomb, 2009; Blackhurst
et al., 2011) as a research area in its infancy.
Table I shows the definitions of supply chain resilience
proposed by some authors throughout the last years. Although
these authors have defined resilience in different words, the
general idea is consistent. Recognising this, supply chain
resilience is defined here as the capability of supply chains to
respond quickly to unexpected events so as to restore
operations to the previous performance level or even to a new
and better one.
Previously, regarding resilience concept, risk and
vulnerability were the most discussed concepts in the
literature. According to Christopher and Peck (2004), risk is
defined as the probability of a given event vs its negative
Figure 1 Number of studies related to supply chain resilience
throughout 13 years
 Achieving supply chain resilience
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva
Table I Definitions of supply chain resilience
Authors Definition
Christopher and “It is the ability of a system to return to its original
Peck (2004) state or move to a new, more desirable state after
being disturbed”
Sheffi and Rice “It is the firm’s ability to absorb disruptions or
(2005) enables the supply chain network to return to state
conditions faster and thus has a positive impact on
firm performance”
Ponomarov and “The adaptive capability of the supply chain to
Holcomb (2009) prepare for unexpected events, respond to
disruptions, and recover from them by maintaining
continuity of operations at the desired level of
connectedness and control over structure and
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
function”
Ates and Bititci “The capacity of an organisation to survive, adapt
(2011) and sustain the business in the face of turbulent
change”
Jüttner and “The apparent ability of some supply chains to
Maklan (2011) recover from inevitable risk events more effectively
than others”
Alberts (2011) “Resilience provide an entity with the ability to
repair, replace, patch, or otherwise reconstitute lost
capability or performance (and hence effectiveness),
at least in part and over time, from misfortune,
damage or a destabilizing perturbation in the
environment”
Carvalho et al. “Resilience is referred to as the ability of supply
(2012a) chains to cope with unexpected disturbances”
business impact, while Jüttner and Maklan (2011) assert that
vulnerability is related to the susceptibility of the supply chains
to likely disruptions. Numerous factors are capable of creating
vulnerability to companies and their supply chains, such as
complex networks, long lead-times and plant locations. Thus,
Sheffi and Rice (2005) argue that the greater the vulnerability
in supply chains, the greater the likelihood of disruptions, and
consequently the greater their impacts; the opposite idea is
also valid. In this sense, risk and vulnerability are concepts that
should be addressed together.
Nevertheless, statements regarding vulnerability and risk
are confused in some cases. Sheffi and Rice (2005, p. 41) state
that “reducing vulnerability means reducing the likelihood of
a disruption and increasing resilience”. However, this is not
always true, knowing that the likelihood is a characteristic of
risks, and sometimes they cannot be avoided or forecast.
Hence, it is not possible to guarantee that reducing risk makes
the supply chain less vulnerable or more resilient. What could
reduce the vulnerability would be to increase its flexibility or
adaptability. Because resilience may be considered a result of
these primary concepts (risk and vulnerability), it, therefore,
cannot be approached without involving them.
Recognising the trend of the growing number of critical
incidents – which may cause huge losses estimated to be
between US$50 and US$100 million (Pereira, 2009) – the
World Economic Forum (2013) affirms that more than 80 per
cent of companies are alert to risk and consider the
importance of supply chain resilience nowadays. In this sense,
resilience has become a current thinking in terms of
sustainable futures for companies by considering diversities of
628
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642
risk and vulnerabilities which are not diminishing with the
current emergent global market.
3. The current view of procurement
Ceasing to be a secondary business function, procurement has
played a fundamental role in organisation’s management by
being responsible for purchasing specific resources from the
external part of the enterprise required by internal operations.
In the literature, procurement and purchasing are sometimes
discussed as interchangeable terms; however, there are
authors (Ellram and Carr, 1994; Monczka et al., 1998; Lysons
and Farrington, 2006; Miemczyk et al., 2012) who distinguish
procurement as an evolution of purchasing which was
fundamentally focused on cost-reduction in the past.
Consequently, procurement is no longer considered a simple
business function accountable for planning, implementing,
evaluating and controlling purchase decisions (Szwejczewski
et al., 2005; Paulraj and Chen, 2007); it also encompasses the
management of resources and suppliers (Ellram and Carr, 1994;
Lindgreen et al., 2013).
For this reason, procurement has enlarged its scope to
achieve a competitive advantage in the current volatile market.
In doing so, it seeks to align and synchronise internal
requirements to external resources so as to reach the
company’s target (Chicksand et al., 2012). In this context,
authors such as Monczka et al. (1998) and Castaldi et al.
(2011) define procurement as a boundary spanning function,
which looks at both sides of the extended enterprise to find
good and reasonable solutions for them (Ellram and Birou,
1995; Lindgreen et al., 2013).
Internally, procurement managers provide information
(such as suppliers’ capacity, logistics data, pricing and
discounts and new products information) to other functions
and internal customers taking responsibility to supply
procurement with their needs (Szwejczewski et al., 2005).
Thus, cross-functional integration between procurement and
other functions is fundamental to increase visibility of the
flows and, consequently, allow for more reliable decision-
making from managers (Chiang et al., 2012). In this regard,
Foerstl et al. (2013) point out, in one of their study’s
propositions, the importance of developing a cross-functional
team in purchasing and supply management.
Externally, procurement is responsible for product or
service cost, timeframes of delivery, product quality and
general supply decisions, such as supplier selection and
supplier relationship (Nix, 2001; Szwejczewski et al., 2005;
Castaldi et al., 2011). Likewise, the aforementioned cross-
functional integration, the relationship between buyer and
supplier also requires collaboration and information sharing
between managers from the both sides. In fact, it normally
involves much more than just a sales-procurement relationship
between buyer and supplier (Agndal and Nilsson, 2007; Castaldi
et al., 2011). Christopher and Jüttner (2000) and McDonald and
Woodburn (2007) discuss four types of buyer–supplier
relationships (basic, cooperative, interdependent and integrated)
which may enhance the agility in response to disruptions for
companies.
In summary, procurement has become widely recognised as an
important function, responsible for increasing competitiveness
within an unstable environment (Lawson et al., 2009),
 Achieving supply chain resilience
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva
influencing positively the organisation profitability (Alinaghian
et al., 2011) and contributing as much as other functions to
business continuity (Andrea et al., 2011; Ellegaard and Koch,
2012). It is, therefore, evident that procurement plays a
fundamental role in any organisation. By doing so, this
function is capable of managing relevant internal and external
organisational issues which may help create supply chain
resilience. Considering the involvement of these two key
subjects (procurement and supply chain resilience), the
question “what are the intra- and inter-organisational issues
which must be assessed and acted upon by procurement in
order to create supply chain resilience?” is, therefore,
addressed to guide this study toward its aim. This is then
applied as the key point of methodology chosen to conduct
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
this study.
4. Research methodology: systematic literature
review
As a result of the amount of information that has arisen from
scientific studies in the past 20 years (Badger et al., 2000;
Petticrew and Roberts, 2006), ensuring that no relevant
research was overlooked has been a challenge for researchers.
Thus, aiming to avoid bias and guarantee rigor, replicability
and consequently relevant results, the systematic literature
review is nowadays applied to guarantee these requirements.
To do so, the steps proposed by Tranfield et al. (2003, 2004)
in Figure 2 are followed bellow.
Stage 1 – planning the review
The aim of this review was determine what is known and what
is not known about the role of procurement in creating supply
Figure 2 Stages for conducting a systematic literature review
629
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642
chain resilience. Thus, after identifying the need for this study
(highlighted in the introduction), the single research question
addressed is: what are the intra- and inter-organisational issues
which must be addressed by Procurement to create supply chain
resilience?
Based on that, a protocol (Table II) was developed by
setting the details out to conduct the whole Stage 2 of the
systematic review process. Considered as two of the most
extensive databases in management, ABI/Inform and EBSCO
were chosen to be the source of data for this study (Khan et al.,
2012; Thomé et al., 2012) in a range of 13 years (2000-2013).
This period was chosen due to the starting point of resilience
concept in supply chain management – mid 2000 (Table III).
Stage 2 – conducting the review
The selection of the papers was conducted through four steps:
1 title and abstract screening;
2 reading of introduction and conclusion besides looking
over the paper’s content;
3 assessing the quality of the journal, language accessibility,
theoretical and empirical content and unit of analysis,;
and
4 finally, applying the quality appraisal criteria, where it
sought to analyse the alignment of the paper’s rational
through research questions, methods and execution of
research, methodological rigour and contribution to
knowledge (Miles and Huberman, 1994).
All these points were referred in detail in the protocol.
Table IV shows the results from each of these steps.
Taking one search string at a time, the next step was to
undertake a broad review of all 3,000 hits by reading the titles
 Achieving supply chain resilience
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva
Table II Protocol for conducting a systematic literature review
Stage 2 Details
Strategy to Identify constructs (Table III); Define keywords
identify studies (Table III);
Develop search strings (Table III);
Search on ABI/Inform and EBSCO databases;
Search on 13-year period (2000-2013)
Selection of the Selection: titles and abstracts screening;
studies Selection: introduction, conclusion and looking
over the paper’s content;
Selection: assessment about quality of
journals (scholarly and peer-reviewed
journals), accessibility (English language
papers), theoretical (Resilience and
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
Procurement within supply chain management
and/or business context) and empirical
content (qualitative and quantitative) and unit
of analysis (organisations, individuals and
inter level);
Selection: quality appraisal of papers. The
purpose of this additional quality assessment
is to attribute levels of quality to papers and
therefore to decide what level of quality
should be included in this review. So that,
each paper was assessed according to its
contribution, strength of argument, theoretical
bases and methodological rigor and only
articles that achieved an average equal or
higher than two (medium level) were
selected–considering that level three was the
highest one
Data extraction Full paper’s reading;
and monitoring Use of the QDA Miner (qualitative software)
process to code the content based on what is
intended to extract. In other words, codes
were created which aims to answer the
question proposed; for instance, possible
barriers and enablers to supply chain
resilience and implications of those on the
procurement activities
Data analysis and Content analysis based on literature review by
synthesis crossing data from different concepts,
discussion and authors.
Answer the review question from what is
known in the literature;
Highlight the relevant points and gaps by the
time
and abstracts. From this first screening for general relevance,
290 journal articles were found. These were transferred into
the Refworks database (tool for managing references), and
duplicates were eliminated. Thus, the total number of articles
was reduced to 207, and then to 133 after the second
selection. Relevant papers were selected using the third and
fourth selection criteria (aforementioned in Table II). At this
point, all 133 papers were fully read and, hence, assessed by
means of the general assessment criteria. After this, the total
was reduced to 51, and finally to 30 journal articles (listed in
Table V and Table VI) which were selected throughout all this
process to help answer the research question previously
proposed.
630
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642
To assist the conduction of all this process, a spreadsheet
was developed to record all information for each of the papers
required to those criteria. It gave support to better analyse the
papers for the final selection, besides being a useful database
for future re-analysis and research. A summary of all these
steps and results are illustrated in Figure 3.
According to Pilbeam et al. (2012), a number of alternative
approaches can be used to analyse and synthesise
systematically the literature review. From that, the content
analysis-based literature review discussed by Seuring and
Gold (2012) was used to analyse the data. According to them,
the reason for approaching this method of analysis is that the
“content analysis offers one sound methodological frame for
conducting rigorous, systematic and reproducible literature
reviews” (p. 545). Following this, the codes were created by
reading and extracting possible enablers and barriers
responsible for creating resilience capability from the
literature, and also implications of those on the procurement
activities, which resulted in the intra- and inter-organisational
issues in the end. To do so, qualitative software (QDA Miner)
was used to support the extraction, organisation and analyses
of the data.
Stage 3 – reporting and dissemination
The final stage is the presentation of the findings and
subsequent analysis. First of all, an underpinning approach is
exposed to support the results based on the context in which
the phenomenon is analysed. Thus, the content is composed
by barriers and enablers to creating supply chain resilience,
followed by a discussion regarding their implications on
procurement activities. Based on that, intra and inter-
organisational issues are highlighted which will be validated in
the future through empirical research. In the end, conclusions
will be drawn by showing the results and limitations, which
derived a number of missing topics for possible future
research.
5. Findings
5.1 Underpinning approach
To understand the complex environment in which
organisations are embedded, and then being able to go beyond
a simple observation and description of the phenomena,
theoretical approaches or theories are used to help researchers
explore in-depth how the phenomenon of interest behaves
from a theoretical basis (Chicksand et al., 2012). The dynamic
capability is a recent approach which has been applicable in
the organisation’s context. Generally, it is defined as “the
firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and
external competences to address rapidly changing
environments” (Teece et al., 1997, p. 509). Therefore, that
dynamic capabilities can develop a source of sustainable
competitive advantage, recognising that their “processes rely
on quickly created new knowledge and iterative execution to
produce adaptive, but unpredictable outcomes” (Eisenhardt
and Martin, 2000, p. 1,106).
Knowing that competences may enable companies to wisely
use their resources to create value (Castaldi et al., 2011), the
foundation of this approach is grounded in distinct skills,
processes, procedures, organisational structures, decision
rules and disciplines of particular organisation (Eisenhardt
 Achieving supply chain resilience Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642

Table III Keywords and codes addressed in the search

Constructs Keywords
Supply chain resilience Supply chain resilience
Resilient supply chain
Resilience/resilient
Supply chain
vulnerability
Vulnerability Risk in
supply chain Risk
Procurement Purchasing
Procurement
Buyer–supplier relationship External integration
Inter-firm integration
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
Codes
ⴱ ⴱ
(supply chain AND resilien OR risk
OR vulnerabⴱ)
(purchasing OR procurement)
(“external integratⴱ” OR “inter-firm
integratⴱ” OR “buyer-supplier
Strings
“supply chainⴱ” w/5 (resilienⴱ OR risk
OR vulnerabⴱ)
(“supply chainⴱ” w/5 (resilienⴱ OR
risk OR vulnerabⴱ) AND (purchasing
OR procurement))
(purchasing OR procurement) AND
(“external integratⴱ” OR “inter-firm

Buyer-supplier relationshipⴱ” OR “sourcing integratⴱ” OR “buyer-supplier

relationship Sourcing strategⴱ” OR partnershipⴱ) relationshipⴱ” OR “sourcing strategⴱ”
strategy Partnership OR partnershipⴱ)
Intra-organisation Internal integration (“cross-functional integratⴱ” OR (purchasing OR procurement) AND
Cross-functional “cross-functional relationshipⴱ” OR (“functional integratⴱ” OR “functional
integration Cross- “internal integratⴱ”) relationshipⴱ” OR “internal
functional relationship integratⴱ”)
Note: A Boolean operator was used to delimit the first search string. So that, w5 or w/5 was used for a “5 word” proximity of the term supply chain.
Search strings for ABI/Inform used w/5, whereas EBSCO used w5

and Martin, 2000; Teece, 2007). Organisations need to
develop new capabilities to cope with untoward events to
achieve rapid response by adapting the resources and changing
normal activities or strategies. It, therefore, fits into the
phenomenon under consideration which is the creation of
supply chain resilience from a procurement perspective.
Because of this correlation between the topic in the study and
research approach, dynamic capability was then applicable
here to support the understanding of this phenomenon.
5.2 Enablers and barriers to creating supply chain
resilience
According to what has been discussed, there are a number of
disturbances which may affect specific nodes along the supply
chains. Although there are risks which cannot be avoided or
forecast, there are also factors which may hamper the building
of resilience in the supply chains. These barriers can normally
impact the daily supply chain management and impede a
quick reaction of companies from disruptions. Thus, as a way
of overcoming those disruptions and assisting the
development of resilience within the companies and along
their supply chains, enablers are also extracted from the
literature. Tables V and VI show all the barriers and enablers
found in the literature.
The barriers and enablers identified in the literature are not
referenced by authors in a clear and separate way; on the
contrary, they are very connected in the most cases. Figure 4
illustrates how a group of barriers and enablers are
interconnected in the content of the papers analysed. This
figure is resulted from a two-dimensional (2D) map created by
the QDA Miner software which uses the cluster analyses
followed by coding co-occurrences of the barriers and enablers
highlighted in this study.
It is noticed that both capabilities collaborate to facilitate or
hamper the creation of supply chain resilience. However, to
what extent do they make significant implications on
procurement activities? Authors make different statements
about them from different perspectives and approaches,
nevertheless specific issues and strategies addressed from
procurement are not clearly presented to create supply chain
resilience. Recognising it, the next item will shed some light on
this question by discussing the implications of procurement
activities on the creation of supply chain resilience.

5.3 Implications of resilient enablers and barriers in

Table IV General results from each step of the searching procurement activities
Total of Considering the enablers highlighted previously, flexibility is
primary First Second one of the most often discussed capabilities in the literature.
search selection selection Its development in a company’s strategy provides a variety of
Strings ABI EBSCO ABI EBSCO ABI EBSCO options in decision-making for procurement managers. In this
Search string 1 530 347 34 49 24 40
regard, authors point out many ways to develop flexibility in
Search string 2 80 73 3 1 2 1 company’s strategy, such as sourcing flexibility (Zeng, 2000;
Search string 3 877 985 26 62 18 29 Tang, 2006a,b; Pettit et al., 2010; Chiang et al., 2012;
Search string 4 64 44 24 8 14 8 Simangunsong et al., 2012), product flexibility (Chiang et al.,
Total 3000 207 133 2012; Simangunsong et al., 2012), process flexibility (Rice and
Caniato, 2003; Chiang et al., 2012; Simangunsong et al.,

631
 Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)

Table V Barriers to creating supply chain resilience

Lack of
Financial Lack of Lack of coordination Lack of Lack of Lack of Lack of Lack of Lack of Long lead Long
Authors Complexity weakness capacity collaboration and control information integration flexibility knowledge visibility trust times distances

Christopher (2000)
Christopher and Jüttner
(2000)
Zsidisin et al. (2000)
Zeng (2000)
Sheffi (2001)
Rice and Caniato (2003)
Christopher and Lee
(2004)
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Achieving supply chain resilience

Christopher and Peck

(2004) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Blackhurst et al. (2005) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Sheffi and Rice (2005) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Tang (2006a) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Tang (2006b) ✓ ✓
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva

Ponomarov and Holcomb

(2009) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Stecke and Kumar (2009) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

632
Lee et al. (2009)
Pettit et al. (2010)
Colicchia et al. (2010)
Yang and Yang (2010)
Tachizawa and Gimenez
(2010)
Zsidisin and Wagner
(2010)
Blackhurst et al. (2011)
Christopher and Holweg
(2011)
Christopher et al. (2011)
Jüttner and Maklan
(2011)
Yi et al. (2011)
Carvalho et al. (2012a)
Carvalho et al. (2012b)
Chiang et al. (2012)
Simangunsong et al.
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642

(2012) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Spiegler et al. (2012) ✓ ✓ ✓
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal

Table VI Enablers to creating supply chain resilience
AUTHORS Flexibility
Christopher (2000)
Christopher and Jüttner
(2000)
Zsidisin et al. (2000)
Zeng (2000)
Sheffi (2001)
Rice and Caniato (2003)
Christopher and Lee
(2004)
Christopher and Peck
(2004)
Blackhurst et al. (2005)
Sheffi and Rice (2005)
Tang (2006a)
Tang (2006b)
Ponomarov and Holcomb
(2009)
Stecke and Kumar
633
(2009)
Lee et al. (2009)
Pettit et al. (2010)
Colicchia et al. (2010)
Yang and Yang (2010)
Tachizawa and Gimenez
(2010)
Zsidisin and Wagner
(2010)
Blackhurst et al. (2011)
Christopher and Holweg
(2011)
Christopher et al. (2011)
Jüttner and Maklan
(2011)
Yi et al. (2011)
Carvalho et al. (2012a)
Carvalho et al. (2012b)
Chiang et al. (2012)
Simangunsong et al.
(2012)
Spiegler et al. (2012)
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
Supply
Information Financial Coordination chain Risk Company’s Velocity and
Redundancy Visibility Agility Collaboration Integration sharing strength and control Trust design management knowledge Alignment acceleration
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Achieving supply chain resilience
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
 Achieving supply chain resilience Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642

Figure 3 Summary of the systematic review process 2012) and transportation flexibility (Tang, 2006a,2006b;
Spiegler et al., 2012).
Regarding sourcing flexibility, Yi et al. (2011) explain that
procurement normally employs this strategy to maintain
supplier availability to support the company with good quality
materials in case of needs. In this sense, Jüttner and Maklan
(2011) assert that sourcing flexibility can be considered a key
enabler to resilience owing to the ability to shift cost-effective
supply sources by choosing the cheapest source or
strengthening the companies’ bargaining power in price
negotiations with their suppliers. In addition, Carvalho et al.
(2012b) highlight its benefits in terms of cost reduction,
critical paths and lead-times. They propose that supplier
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)

flexibility implies in agility and resilience through a conceptual

model, which increases the responsiveness of the company in
critical times.
On the other hand, the lack of this capability can cause
considerable adverse effects to companies. After clearly stating
that flexibility impacts supply and procurement, Sheffi and
Rice (2005) report the unsuccessful case of Land Rover to

Figure 4 Interconnections of barriers and enablers

634
 Achieving supply chain resilience
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva
exemplify how flexibility in sourcing can be a powerful tool to
avoid opportunism from suppliers. For this reason, these
authors in support to others (Zsidisin et al., 2000; Christopher
and Lee, 2004; Stecke and Kumar, 2009; Colicchia et al.,
2010; Zsidisin and Wagner, 2010; Christopher and Holweg,
2011) affirm that relying on a single supplier may be a risky
option. Therefore, the lack of flexibility is considered one of
the key barriers due to hamper the normal flow of product
manufacturing and delivery in some occasions. Nevertheless,
Christopher and Peck (2004) and Sheffi and Rice (2005) also
state that despite this risk, it may be a good option to improve
quality and cost of the final products by investing in a few
supplier relationships.
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
Regarding supplier relationship, Christopher (2000) and
Christopher and Jüttner (2000) affirm that different structural
interfaces between buyer and supplier may increase the level of
connectivity between both parts. As a result, agility is
enhanced by reducing the responsibility of procurement to
mediate the flow of information between buyer and supplier,
and hence increase the information sharing among other
functions. Because of that Christopher (2000) states that agile
companies normally have a small supplier base, prioritising
strong relationships and more information sharing to increase
the level of connectivity. Considering the trade-off of having a
single or multiple sourcing and in support of Simangunsong
et al. (2012), it is recognised here that employing a balance
source of suppliers would be a reasonable choice to create
resilience in the supply chain. This would allow companies to
skip out the risk of relying on only one supplier by having other
suppliers if the need arises. It also helps to keep reasonable
material quality, product cost and reliable delivery.
Following this line of thought, one of the criteria to select
suppliers is their financial situation. Thus, Zsidisin et al. (2000,
p. 188) state that “if a supplier is not profitable, it may not stay
in business for very long”, recognising that it can be a risk for the
buyer company. For this reason, financial strength is highlighted
here as a resilient enabler which impacts on procurement
activities. Furthermore, collaboration is found to be a good way
to achieve effectiveness of the supplier’s management team, while
velocity and acceleration is normally related to suppliers’ location
(Tang, 2006a; Zsidisin and Wagner, 2010).
Flexibility is not the only enabler that has an impact on the
sourcing strategy. Internal integration and information sharing
may also be expected to be positively linked to supplier
responsiveness. Agility is critical regarding the global sourcing
process because it is able to reduce time response to supply
disruptions (Christopher and Holweg, 2011), whereas
redundancy can also enhance time response but may influence
the inventory cost (Carvalho et al., 2012a). In addition,
Christopher and Holweg (2011) say that enhancing
collaboration between buyers and suppliers may significantly
help mitigate risk which is one of the procurement activities,
especially when dealing with global sourcing. Otherwise, the
lack of confidence discussed by Christopher and Lee (2004)
would result in poor collaboration and visibility at the
upstream of the supply chain, which impacts on procurement
in terms of inaccurate forecasts, inventory and purchase cost.
All these points are, therefore, relevant for supplier
development.
635
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642
To support sourcing strategies, companies should know
how to manage their inventories wisely. Considering the
uncertain environment in which they are currently working in,
authors and practitioners have emphasised the need to
develop preventative actions. Thus, the manner of organising
and managing inventory has been based on this concern.
Sheffi (2001) proposes two ways of employing warehouse:
centralised and dispersed. The first enables companies to be
responsive by affording extra capacity in one strategic area
which aims to supply the deficits in others. Although this
author states that reducing the number of warehouses and
inventories has been a trend in the current uncertain scenario,
this decision may be a risky strategy; recognising that in case of
local incidents no other option will be available to supply the
emergency needs (Stecke and Kumar, 2009; Christopher and
Holweg, 2011). Nonetheless, it is important to highlight that
despite the inventory having been a great strategy to improve
agility and responsiveness, it gives time to companies come up
with solutions after disruptions. It does not reduce any chance
of undesirable incidents (Zsidisin et al., 2000).
In this case, Zsidisin and Wagner (2010) and Carvalho et al.
(2012a) expose that safety stock can be a good solution for
emergency situations, subject which Sheffi (2001) had
previously discussed considering the difference between
emergency stock vs safety stock. Normally, safety stock is used
to cover day-to-day demand fluctuations which is the opposite
aim of emergency stock. The latter tries to keep redundant stock
to mitigate effects from extreme disruptions. Sheffi (2005)
exemplifies this point by reporting the case of Pentagon and its
key supplier – Johnson & Johnson (J&J). As a major provider of
medical supplies, J&J has uncertainty demands due to the high
variability of cause diseases, such as flu, fever, cold and many
other outbreak diseases. Because of that, Pentagon has to be sure
that it will be able to cover any request at any time. To correspond
to all the requirements, J&J keeps an extra stock exclusively to
Pentagon which must not be used to cover daily demand
fluctuations. In this way, Stecke and Kumar (2009) point out the
advantage of creating redundancy for critical components which
should be maintained with limited investment.
The current network has been characterised by its
complexity, in which numerous flows across different global
companies may impact the reliability of deliveries and the
customer satisfaction. In this context, Zsidisin and Wagner
(2010) state that long supply chains may create problems that
arise from political instability in certain regions of the world,
greater uncertainty transportation and complexity for
example. Furthermore, Christopher and Holweg (2011)
asserts that it may increase risk along the supply chains from a
variety of reasons such as disruptions, bankruptcies and
breakdowns. Thus, once a disruption hits one member of the
supply chain, the effects will be transferred to the
interconnected members in the same network. Therefore,
increasing network complexity can enhance vulnerability and
reduce agility along the supply chains (Yang and Yang, 2010).
For this reason, collaboration among functions, as well as
inter-organisational alignment, is required among supply chain
members (Pettit et al., 2010). Moreover, visibility and alignment
should be improved so that procurement may not only quickly
recognise disruptions occurring at upstream of the supply chain
but also to monitor inventories, demand and supply conditions
 Achieving supply chain resilience Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642

to manage purchasing schedules (Christopher and Peck, 2004;
Sheffi and Rice, 2005). In this regard, Tang (2006a), Christopher
and Holweg (2011), Blackhurst et al. (2011) and Carvalho et al.
(2012a) depict that one possible solution to deal with complexity
would be the network redesign to increase capabilities like visibility
and alignment, and hence mitigate risky situations.
Regarding the growing level of risk faced by companies
nowadays, Ponomarov and Holcomb (2009, p. 137) assert
that “risk assessment and sharing among the members of a
supply chain is an essential element of risk mitigation”. Also
Jüttner and Maklan (2011) state, as a result of their study, that
monitoring supply risks had a positive impact on the supply
chain visibility. Therefore, risk management seems to be a
prominent procurement activity which intends to closely
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
a more resilient reaction than Ford (Sheffi, 2005) which bore
the loss of five non-working manufacturing plants.
In terms of information sharing, workers’ knowledge is a
very important capability that companies should record and
share (Blackhurst et al., 2011). In addition, technology tools
are considered powerful ways of maintaining the information
flow among functions and companies, for instance. In support
that Lee et al. (2009) highlight the positive effect of
technological changes in strategic purchasing and supplier
alliances, Nix (2001) still complements by pointing out its
value to manage complexity purchasing activities and facilitate
the integration across a company’s board.
In summary, procurement has proved to be a key interface
function with great capacity to communicate changes quickly

monitor the contingencies from various risk resources,
normally focused on the upstream of the company.
In terms of product, flexibility also enables a rapid change in
product design by providing a range of products which will
respond effectively in case of an immediate change (Yi et al.,
2011). To doing so, procurement has the role of developing
purchasing strategies to match and fulfil the internal
requirements. However, although flexibility seems to be an
advantageous way of increasing agility and resilience in the end,
a high level of product flexibility may cause complexity and
difficulties to handle all specifications in only one manufacturing
plant. For this reason, Stecke and Kumar (2009) and Blackhurst
et al. (2011) propose practices such as postponement, mass
customisation and centralised inventory management which
aims to reduce complexity by creating a modular product. These
practices help reduce risk and vulnerability by sharing risk among
members of the supply chain.
Flexibility in terms of transportation is also a very
well-discussed strategy when the topic is uncertain and
unexpected events (Sheffi and Rice, 2005; Tang, 2006a;
Stecke and Kumar, 2009). In this regard, the widespread case
of Ford and Chrysler after the 9/11 terrorist attack is a good
example. Chrysler by quickly changing the transportation
mode of delivery could load its delivery in time and without
huge losses. Because of this transport flexibility, Chrysler had
through market demand to suppliers (Chiang et al., 2012), which
makes a great difference in a turbulent environment (Lee et al.,
2009). In this context, it is, therefore, clear that resilient enablers
and barriers are closely linked to procurement activities, which,
in turn, can make a significant contribution to creating supply
chain resilience if well-managed. Also, as referred to earlier,
barriers have the opposite idea from enablers. For this reason, the
discussion was mostly focused on enablers and their implications
on procurement activities. In this sense, Table VII shows an
overview of the most often used enablers related to procurement
activities according to the above discussion.
6. Intra- and inter-organisational issues
In a general way, it is known that procurement seeks to ensure
that all orders are placed with the right amount, at the right time,
and at the right place with the right quality (Zeng, 2000), and
that resilience is not a state but a dynamic set of conditions within
a system (Mitchell and Harris, 2012). Thus, based on what has
been shown and discussed about the influence of enablers and
barriers into procurement activities, it is clear that procurement
does make relevant contributions to supply chain resilience. This
allows for particular intra- and inter-organisational issues to be
extracted from the previous discussion and grouped into key
general topics of understanding (Table VIII).

Table VII Interconnection of procurement activities and the most often cited enablers
Information
Corresponding procurement activities Flexibility Redundancy Visibility Agility Collaboration Integration sharing
Supplier base ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Supplier selection criteria ✓ ✓ ✓
Supplier relationships ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Developing suppliers ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Network configuration ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Transportation modes ✓ ✓
Risk sources ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Knowledge backup ✓ ✓ ✓
Internal communication ✓ ✓ ✓
Internal stock ✓ ✓ ✓
Redundancy of critical ✓ ✓
Product flexibility ✓ ✓
Communication tools ✓ ✓ ✓
Technological methods to discover, recover
and redesign the supply chain ✓ ✓ ✓

636
 Achieving supply chain resilience Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642

Table VIII Intra- and inter-organisational issues

Type General points Issues Authors
Intra-organisational Knowledge acquired Knowledge backup Sheffi (2001); Blackhurst et al. (2011); Juttner and Maklan (2011)
issues Internal communication among Christopher and Peck (2004); Svahn and Westerlund (2009)
functions
Inventory Internal stock Christopher and Peck (2004); Zsidisin and Wagner (2010);
Carvalho et al. (2012)
Redundancy of critical Sheffi (2001); Stecke and Kumar (2009)
components
Product Product flexibility Tang (2006a,b); Sheffi and Rice (2005); Stecke and Kumar
(2009); Yang and Yang (2010); Blackhurst et al. (2011)
Technology Tool for improving communication Christopher and Lee (2004); Tachizawa and Gimenez (2010)
Technological methods to Sheffi (2001); Blackhurst et al. (2005); Sheffi and Rice (2005);
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)

discover, recover and redesign the Tang (2006b); Christopher and Holweg (2011); Carvalho et al.
supply chain (2012b)

Inter-organisational Strategic sourcing Supplier base Zsidisin et al. (2000); Sheffi (2001); Zsidisin (2003); Sheffi and
issues Rice (2005); Svahn and Westerlund (2009); Zsidisin and Wagner
(2010); Yang and Yang (2010); Blackhurst et al. (2011);
Christopher et al. (2011); Stecke and Kumar (2009); Carvalho et
al. (2012a); Simangunsong et al. (2012)
Criteria for supplier selection Zsidisin et al. (2000); Sheffi (2001); Zsidisin (2003); Blackhurst et
al. (2005); Tang (2006a); Stecke and Kumar (2009); Zsidisin and
Wagner (2010); Blackhurst et al. (2011); Christopher et al.
(2011); Carvalho et al. (2012b)
Supplier relationships Zsidisin et al. (2000); Sheffi (2001); Tang (2006a); Svahn and
Westerlund (2009); Yang and Yang (2010); Zsidisin and Wagner
(2010); Blackhurst et al (2011); Christopher et al. (2011).
Developing suppliers Zsidisin et al. (2000); Tang (2006b); Chiang et al. (2012)
Supply chain design Supply chain configuration Christopher and Peck (2004); Blackhurst et al. (2005); Tang
(2006a); Christopher et al. (2011); Blackhurst et al. (2011);
Carvalho et al. (2012b); Spiegler et al. (2012).
Transportation Transportation mode Sheffi and Rice (2005); Tang (2006a); Stecke and Kumar (2009).
Risk management Risk sources Christopher and Peck (2004); Zsidisin (2003); Colicchia et al.
(2010); Christopher et al. (2011)

Both intra- and inter-organisational issues were considered by an important issue which is considered by The World
the literature as meaningful to companies by enabling them to Economic Forum (2013) as one of the ways to create supply
bounce back easily from emergency situations through chain resilience. It assists data sharing and visibility, for
procurement, which acted like a bridge by connecting internal instance.
and external organisation’s requirements. Thus, the first
framework (Figure 5) was developed to join the theoretical Figure 5 Framework of intra- and inter-organisational
findings following the rational of this study. Intra- issues from a procurement perspective to create supply chain
organisational issues were, therefore, grouped in knowledge resilience
acquired, inventory, product and technology areas, while
strategic sourcing, supply chain design, transportation and risk
were the general points from inter-organisation issues.
Taking into consideration the intra-organisational issues,
knowledge acquired is characterised as a key general point to
enable companies to overcome problems by lessons learnt
from difficult experiences. Moreover, there is the daily
knowledge acquired through internal communication among
functions within the company. Regarding inventory, it is
noticed that different ways to manage it can enable companies
to think and act wisely to return as quickly as possible to
normal activities and performance. Developing product
flexibility is also a strategy that helps companies in critical
situations; however, it should be combined to the other
general points, such as sourcing strategic and inventory.
Technology, particularly information technology (IT), is also

637
 Achieving supply chain resilience
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva
Regarding inter-organisational issues, strategic sourcing is
underpinned by four fundamental issues. By managing them
properly, procurement managers will be able to develop a
good relationship with suppliers, and hence find beneficial
ways to make strategic and effective decisions. Connected to
the next issue, strategic sourcing can help the supply chain
design (or supply chain configuration or even re-engineering)
to reduce complexity and enhance the alignment of the flows
throughout the supply chain. How to transport products is
also an issue to be carefully observed and managed if the need
arises. Finally, it is vital that supplier risk be regularly
monitored and assessed by procurement managers.
Overall, there is a need to analyse trade-offs involved in each
of these issues, so that managers should be more aware of the
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
current situation of the market, the environment and the
company’s operation to make decisions less likely to lead to
disruptions. Bearing this in mind, by managing and
controlling those intra and inter-organisational issues, which
have proven to be closely linked to resilient enablers and
procurement activities, it is possible to achieve supply chain
resilience. Figure 6 summarises this rationale which resulted
from the discussion and findings of this study.
7. Conclusion
Although supply chain resilience is pointed out by some
scholars as a subject in its infancy (Christopher and Peck,
2004; Blackhurst et al.,2005; 2011), a growing number of
studies have been published on this topic along with supply
chain risk and vulnerability due to changes in the market and
the environment. Thus, this exploratory study used the
systematic literature review method to investigate intra- and
inter-organisational issues present in the literature by which
procurement should address to create supply chain resilience.
Table VIII exhibits the findings of this study in exposing the
intra- and inter-organisation issues elicited from the above
discussion about the implications of enablers (and barriers) on
procurement activities. These issues were still grouped in eight
general points related to procurement function which makes the
link between internal and external of the company (Figure 5). A
good management and control of both intra- and
inter-organisational issues by procurement managers (according
to the discussion in the item 5.3) will make companies achieve an
effective supply chain resilience (Figure 6).
Figure 6 Framework of achieving supply chain resilience
through intra and inter-organisational issues
638
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642
A number of theoretical implications can be listed as a result
of this study. First, a positive influence was shown of those
enablers highlighted in Table VII on procurement activities.
Overall, enablers and barriers identified here are all capable of
improving or reducing the effectiveness of resilience capability
in the supply chain. Due to barriers having presented opposite
characteristics from enablers in general, the analysis and
discussion were mostly focused on the enablers. Second, it
helped explore an unstudied point in the literature by
expanding the knowledge built so far in operations
management and supply chain management through
identifying the connection between a mature business
function (procurement) to a recent area of the supply chain
management (resilience). Additionally, it adds to knowledge
in the supply chain strategy literature with regard to those
organisational issues that may help procurement managers
better orchestrate the flow of goods and information along the
supply chains to cope with supply disruptions. Moreover, risk
and integration are two points emphasised in this paper which
further augments the literature in these areas. Third, this study
also highlights the benefits of using proactive actions by
focusing on key issues to create the resilience capability within
the companies or along their supply chains to overcome
critical disruptions as well as daily outages.
Likewise, for the theoretical implications of this research,
the light shed on the issues underpinning the development of
a resilience capability from a procurement perspective can also
be considered a contribution. By managing them proactively,
practitioners are able to deal with unplanned outages without
taking the risk of making immediate and inefficient decisions
which will impact the firm’s performance. Furthermore, it will
help procurement to enlarge and reaffirm its internal and
external relationship with internal customers and suppliers by
fulfilling efficiently its responsibilities of boundary spanning
function.
Considering the relation of this topic in study to the
corresponding underpinning approach, Ellram et al. (2013,
p. 30) affirm that “a conceptual theory building uses existing
theory, literature and other data sources to both inductively
and deductively advance the understanding of a particular
phenomenon”. Thus, following this rationale to understand
the phenomenon through dynamic capability approach
referred earlier, those organisational issues may help managers
to reconfigure competences and resources so internally as
externally. Thereupon companies will be able to cope with
untoward events in a rapid and effective way by adapting the
resources, activities and/or strategies. Furthermore, the same
authors also state that theory building involves “identifying an
important gap in current theory and knowledge, gathering
data and defining variables, limiting and defining the domain
and building relationships among variables and developing
predictions” (p. 30). These steps set forth as a possible way
forward for this study by verifying empirically the intra- and
inter-organisational issues identified here, and how they are
managed and controlled by procurement practitioners. In this
sense, the present study can be considered a step toward
theory-building by offering directions for future research,
besides offering a contribution to the literature of supply chain
strategy, supply chain risk and supply chain integration.
 Achieving supply chain resilience
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva
7.1 Limitations and recommendations for further
research
Despite the findings and implications highlighted above, this
study also presents limitations. First, it is purely exploratory
based on the body of knowledge presented in two databases in
the past 13 years, as it followed the systematic review process.
Second, it was focused on procurement activities which although
have a strategic and important function that interfaces focal
company and suppliers, is only one part of the organisation.
Third, and following the second limitation, it was restricted to
the upstream of the supply chain and it might be interesting to
explore the downstream side in further research.
Considering these limitations, a number of missing topics
can be highlighted for further research. Empirical studies can
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
delve into the role of procurement in creating supply chain
resilience considering that useful knowledge is achieved by
interplaying with the reality (MacCarthy et al., 2013). In this
context, qualitative and quantitative research can help to
advance the knowledge by applying them suitably. Regarding
qualitative methods, one opportunity for future research could
be conducting multiple case studies in manufacturing
companies from a single sector. For example, the technology
or fashion sector which are embedded in a very uncertain and
dynamic market. It would assist to verify whether the
aforementioned issues are applicable, efficient and sufficient
to create supply chain resilience. Comparing these issues in
different sectors is also a good research opportunity to
visualise different perspectives, common issues among them
or even identify additional ones. As following research, a
comparison study among different countries would be relevant
to come up with possible issues related to culture, economy
and environment. Furthermore, to narrow down the scope of
the future studies, researchers could focus on specific
products, suppliers or even distinct disruptions to investigate
the creation of resilience capability for particular critical cases.
Also future research could develop a longitudinal study, so
that researchers could identify the evolution of resilient
strategies. This research opportunity was already referenced
by Jüttner and Maklan (2011) and Pettit et al. (2013),
however from a different context to the focus of this study.
Likewise, those future propositions to qualitative research,
quantitative methods can also be applied to test the findings
statistically. In this case, a survey structured by the likert scale
could be used to test and quantify the issues found in this
study. Although the rate of response in this method is
normally low, it has the advantage of gathering data from a
variety of companies in different countries owing to the global
internet accessibility. Nevertheless, Pettit et al. (2013)
highlight in their research, ways to increase the response rate,
such as preliminary messages, follow-up reminders,
personalisation of requests and deadline dates. Furthermore,
the development of a mixed method should be a valuable
research because it has increasingly been employed by raising
the validity of the findings through examining the same
phenomenon qualitatively and quantitatively (Brannen,
1992). Moreover, MacCarthy et al. (2013) state that both
methodological approaches are essential and inextricably
linked for theory building and knowledge development.
Delving the knowledge into resilient enablers and barriers is
also a good opportunity for further research, as they are the
639
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642
starting point to extract the organisational issues. Thus, a focus
group method can help to come up with a variety of outcomes by
creating a discussion among managers with different skills,
experiences and motivation. It should be interesting during this
session to apply the critical incident technique (Flanagan, 1954).
This additional tool could help to collect data in a more systemic
way to increase the soundness of the possible outcomes.
Afterwards, methodologies such as Interpretive Structural
Modelling (ISM) approached by Faisal et al. (2006) and Fuzzy
Interpretative Structural Modelling (FISM) applied by Yenradee
and Dangton (2000) could be relevant to understand the
relationship among the enablers.
The phenomenon in analysis – creation of supply chain
resilience – may be encompassed not only procurement effort but
also a set of business functions effort (logistics, sales and
marketing for example) within the focal firm and along members
of the supply chain. Accordingly, issues and actions from
different function perspectives should be further explored to
build a resilient supply chain. Furthermore, it is known that
resilience is not a cheap strategy. So that other opportunities to
research could focus on organisational performance by
examining how costs to create resilience capability can be
minimised. It will guide practitioners to manager systematically
their general resources with the aim to be more effective in the
disruption recovery.
The involvement of this topic with other underpinning
approaches or theories should also be considered for further
research. Resource dependence theory (Pfeffer and Salancik,
1982), strategic choice (Child, 1972; Miles and Snow, 2003)
or strategic contingency theory (Hickson et al., 1971) could be
interesting theories to address the phenomenon since they all
consider the environmental influence on the organisation’s
actions, performance and consequently business continuity.
However, for each one of these, the phenomenon should be
approached differently according to their particularities.
Finally, trade-off decisions of supply chain resilience and
procurement should be investigated to delve further into this
study which could produce additional and meaningful results.
Among all these opportunities for future research, the next
step of this study will focus on an empirical research. To do so,
a multiple case study will be developed in four international
companies located in Brazil, where semi-structured interviews
will be conducted with procurement managers from the focal
firm and with up to three of its key suppliers. The decision to
interview both sides of the enterprise was made to avoid bias by
only having a perspective from the buyer company. Furthermore,
it is possible to extend such results to other links along the supply
chain and not focus only on a single company or dyads. This will
seek to explore whether those intra- and inter-organisational
issues highlighted in the conceptual framework are really
important and sufficient to creating supply chain resilience. The
forethoughts about such organisational issues will help managers
avoid mismatches in the long run.
Based on the findings and the recommendations for future
research listed here, it is advocated that this topic is relevant to
be studied, considering its importance to deal with the
emergent, volatile and challengeable market plus an unstable
environment. It has also being closely linked to a boundary
spanning function involved in one of the top recent topics
studied at the moment: global sourcing risk. Indeed, moving
 Achieving supply chain resilience
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva
away from traditional strategies and plans to manage risk in
the supply chain is something that managers are already aware
of in the current climate. Therefore, companies should take
advantage of the current crisis arising from this era of
turbulence to overcome not only disruptions, but also become
more competitive in a volatile market.
Note
1. All the papers included in this graph are not exclusively
related to resilience. They also approach vulnerability,
uncertainties, risk and disruptions (interconnected
concepts). In addition, as the search was conducted
between December 2012 and January 2013, no paper
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
related to the topic in study from 2013 was found.
References
Agndal, H. and Nilsson, U. (2007), “Activity-based costing:
effects of long-term buyer-supplier relationships”,
Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management, Vol. 4
No. 3, pp. 222-245.
Alberts, D.S. (2011), The Agility Advantage: a Survival Guide
for Complex Enterprise and Endeavors, The Command and
Control Research Program Publication, Department of
Defence, WA, DC.
Alinaghian, L.S., Aghdasi, M. and Srai, J.S. (2011),
“Developing a refined model for purchasing and supply
system transformation: benefiting from organizational
change theories in purchasing development models”, 20th
Annual IPSERA Conference, Maastricht, pp. 1-17.
Andrea, F., Arnaldo, C. and Romano, P. (2011),
“Understanding how formal and informal communication
affect purchasing, manufacturing and logistics integration”,
Advances in Management, Vol. 4 No. 7, pp. 22-32.
Ates, A. and Bititci, U. (2011), “Change process: a key
enabler for building resilient SMEs”, International Journal of
Production Research, Vol. 49 No. 18, pp. 5601-5618.
Badger, D., Nursten, J., Williams, P. and Woodward, M.
(2000), “Should all literature reviews be systematic?”,
Evaluation and Research in Education, Vol. 14 No. 3,
pp. 220-230.
Blackhurst, J., Craighead, C.W., Elkins, D. and
Handfield, R.B. (2005), “An empirically derived agenda of
critical research issues for managing supply-chain
disruptions”, International Journal of Production Research,
Vol. 43 No. 19, pp. 4067-4081.
Blackhurst, J., Dunn, K.S. and Craighead, C.W. (2011), “An
empirically derived framework of global supply resiliency”,
Journal of Business Logistics, Vol. 32 No. 4, pp. 374-391.
Bode, C., Wagner, S.M., Petersen, K.J. and Ellram, L.M.
(2011), “Understanding responses to supply chain
disruptions: insights from information processing and
resource dependence perspectives”, Academy of
Management Journal, Vol. 54 No. 4, pp. 833-856.
Brannen, J. (1992), “Combining qualitative and quantitative
approaches: an overview”, in Brannen, J. (Ed.), Mixing
Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Research, Avebury,
Aldershot.
Carvalho, H., Azevedo, S.G. and Cruz-Machado, V. (2012a),
“Agile and resilient approaches to supply chain
640
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642
management: influence on performance and
competitiveness”, Logistics Research, Vol. 4 Nos 1/2,
pp. 49-62.
Carvalho, H., Barroso, A.P., Machado, V.H., Azevedo, S. and
Cruz-Machado, V. (2012b), “Supply chain redesign for
resilience using simulation”, Computers & Industrial
Engineering, Vol. 62 No. 1, pp. 329-341.
Castaldi, C., Kate, C.T., Braber, R. (2011), “Strategic
purchasing and innovation: a relational view”, Technology
Analysis & Strategic Management, Vol. 23 No. 9,
pp. 983-1000.
Chiang, C., Kocabasoglu-Hillmer, C. and Suresh, N. (2012),
“An empirical investigation of the impact of strategic
sourcing and flexibility on firm’s supply chain agility”,
International Journal of Operations & Production
Management, Vol. 32 No. 1, pp. 49-78.
Chicksand, D., Watson, G., Walker, H., Radnor, Z. and
Johnston, R. (2012), “Theoretical perspectives in
purchasing and supply chain management: an analysis of
the literature”, Supply Chain Management: An International
Journal, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 454-472.
Child, J. (1972), “Organizational structure, environment and
performance: the role of strategic choice”, Sociology, Vol. 6
No. 1, pp. 1-22.
Christopher, M. (2000), “The agile supply chain: competing
in volatile markets”, Industrial Marketing Management,
Vol. 29 No. 1, pp. 37-44.
Christopher, M. and Holweg, M. (2011), “Supply Chain 2.0:
managing supply chains in the era of turbulence”,
International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics
Management, Vol. 41 No. 1, pp. 63-82.
Christopher, M. and Jüttner, U. (2000), “Developing
strategic partnerships in the supply chain: a practitioner
perspective”, European Journal of Purchasing & Supply
Management, Vol. 6 No. 2, pp. 117-127.
Christopher, M. and Lee, H. (2004), “Mitigating supply chain
risk through improved confidence”, International Journal of
Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, Vol. 34 No. 5,
pp. 388-396.
Christopher, M. and Peck, H. (2004), “Building the resilient
supply chain”, International Journal of Logistics Management,
Vol. 15 No. 2, pp. 1-14.
Christopher, M., Mena, C., Khan, O. and Yurt, O. (2011),
“Approaches to managing global sourcing risk”, Supply
Chain Management, Vol. 16 No. 2, pp. 67-81.
Colicchia, C., Dallari, F. and Melacini, M. (2010),
“Increasing supply chain resilience in a global sourcing
context”, Production Planning & Control, Vol. 21 No. 7,
pp. 680-694.
Eisenhardt, K.M. and Martin, J.A. (2000), “Dynamic
capabilities: what are they?”, Strategic Management Journal,
Vol. 21 Nos 10/11, pp. 1105-1121.
Ellegaard, C. and Koch, C. (2012), “The effects of low
internal integration between purchasing and operations on
suppliers’ resource mobilization”, Journal of Purchasing &
Supply Management, Vol. 18 No. 3, pp. 148-158.
Ellram, L.M. and Birou, L.M. (1995), Purchasing for Bottom
Line Impact: Improving the Organization Through Strategic
Procurement, McGraw-Hill Education, New York, NY.
 Achieving supply chain resilience
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva
Ellram, L.M. and Carr, A. (1994), “Strategic purchasing: a
history and review of the literature”, International Journal of
Purchasing and Materials Management, Vol. 30 No. 2,
pp. 1-9.
Ellram, L.M., Tate, W.L. and Feitzinger, E.G. (2013),
“Factor-market rivalry and competition for supply chain
resources”, Journal of Supply Chain Management, Vol. 49
No. 1, pp. 29-46.
Faisal, M.N., Banwet, D.K. and Shankar, R. (2006), “Supply
chain risk mitigation: modeling the enablers”, Business
Process Management Journal, Vol. 12 No. 4, pp. 535-552.
Flanagan, J.C. (1954), “The critical incident technique”,
Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 51 No. 4, pp. 1-33.
Foerstl, K., Hartmann, E., Wynstra, F. and Moser, R. (2013),
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
“Cross-functional integration and functional coordination
in purchasing and supply management Antecedents and
effects on purchasing and firm performance”, International
Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 33
No. 6, pp. 689-721.
Hickson, D.J., Hinings, C.R., Lee, C.A., Schneck, R.E. and
Pennings, M. (1971), “A strategic contingency’ theory of
intraorganizational power”, Administrative Science Quarterly,
Vol. 6 No. 2, pp. 1-22.
Instituto de Logística e Supply Chain - ILOS (2013),
“Manifestação afeta logística e já para fábricas pelo país”,
available at: www.ilos.com.br/clipping/index.php?option⫽
com_content&task⫽view&id⫽7009&Ite mid⫽27 (accessed
02 September 2013).
Jüttner, U. and Maklan, S. (2011), “Supply chain resilience in
the global financial crisis: an empirical study”, Supply Chain
Management, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 246-259.
Khan, O., Christopher, M. and Creazza, A. (2012), “Aligning
product design with the supply chain: a case study”, Supply
Chain Management, Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 323-336.
Lawson, B., Cousins, P.D., Handfield, R.B. and Petersen, K.J.
(2009), “Strategic purchasing, supply management practices
and buyer performance improvement: an empirical study of
UK manufacturing organisations”, International Journal of
Production Research, Vol. 47 No. 10, pp. 2649-2667.
Lee, P.K.C., Yeung, A.C.L. and Edwin Cheng, T.C. (2009),
“Supplier alliances and environmental uncertainty: an
empirical study”, International Journal of Production
Economics, Vol. 120 No. 1, pp. 190-204.
Lindgreen, A., Vanhamme, J., Van Raaij, E.M. and
Johnston, W.J. (2013), “Go configure: the mix of
purchasing practices to choose for your supply base”,
California Management Review, Vol. 55 No. 2, pp. 72-96.
Lysons, K. and Farrington, B. (2006), Purchasing and supply
chain management, 7th ed., Pearson Education Limited,
Essex, England.
McDonald, M. and Woodburn, D. (2007), Key Account
Management: The Definitive Guide, Elsevier, Oxford.
MacCarthy, B.L., Lewis, M., Voss, C. and Narasimham, R.
(2013), “The same old methodologies? Perspectives on OM
research in the post-lean age”, International Journal of
Operations & Production Management, Vol. 33 No. 7,
pp. 934-956.
Miemczyk, J. and Johnsen, T.E. and Macquet, M. (2012),
“Sustainable purchasing and supply management: a
structured literature review of definitions and measures at the
641
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642
dyad, chain and network levels”, Supply Chain Management:
An International Journal, Vol. 17 No. 5, pp. 478-496.
Miles, M.B. and Huberman, A.M. (1994), Qualitative Data
Analysis: An Expanded Source-Book, Sage Publications,
London.
Miles, R.E. and Snow, C.C. (2003), “Organisational strategy,
structure, and process”, Stanford University Press, New York.
Mitchell and Harris (2012), “Resilience: a risk management
approach”, Working Paper, Background Note, Overseas
Development Institute, January, pp. 1-7.
Monczka, R., Trent, R. and Handfield, R. (1998), Purchasing
and Supply Chain Management, South-Western College
Publishing, Ohio.
Nix, N.W. (2001), “Purchasing in a supply chain context”, in
Mentzer, J.T (Ed.), Supply Chain Management, Sage
Publication, London.
Paulraj, A. and Chen, I.J. (2007), “Environmental uncertainty
and strategic supply management: a resource dependence
perspective and performance implications”, Journal of
Supply Chain Management, Vol. 43 No. 3, pp. 29-42.
Pereira, J.V. (2009), “The new supply chain’s frontier:
information management”, International Journal of
Information Management, Vol. 29 No. 5, p. 372.
Petticrew, M. and Roberts, H. (2006), Systematic Reviews in
the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide, Blackwell Publishing,
Oxford.
Pettit, T.J., Fiksel, J. and Croxton, K.L. (2010), “Ensuring
supply chain resilience: development of a conceptual
framework”, Journal of Business Logistics, Vol. 31 No. 1,
pp. 1-21.
Pettit, T.J., Croxton, K.L. and Fiksel, J. (2013), “Ensuring
supply chain resilience: development and implementation
of an assessment tool”, Journal of Business Logistics, Vol. 34
No. 1, pp. 46-76.
Pfeffer, J. and Salancik, G.R. (1982), The External Control of
Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective, Harper
and Row, New York, NY.
Pilbeam, C., Alvarez, G. and Wilson, H. (2012), “The
governance of supply network: a systematic literature
review”, Supply Chain Management: An International
Journal, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 358-376.
Ponomarov, S.Y. and Holcomb, M.C. (2009),
“Understanding the concept of supply chain resilience”,
International Journal of Logistics Management, Vol. 20 No. 1,
pp. 124-143.
Rice, J.B. and Caniato, F. (2003), “Building a secure and
resilient supply network”, Supply Chain Management
Review, Vol. 7 No. 5, pp. 22-30.
Svahn, S. and Westerlund, M. (2009), “Purchasing strategies
in supply relationships”, Journal of Business & Industrial
Marketing, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 173-181.
Seuring, S. and Gold, S. (2012), “Conducting
content-analysis based literature reviews in supply chain
management”, Supply Chain Management: An International
Journal, Vol. 17 No. 5, pp. 544-555.
Sheffi, J. (2005), The resilient enterprise: overcoming vulnerability
for competitive advantage, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Sheffi, Y. (2001), “Supply chain management under the
threat of international terrorism”, International Journal of
Logistics Management, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 1-11.
 Achieving supply chain resilience
Carla Roberta Pereira, Martin Christopher and Andrea Lago Da Silva
Sheffi, Y. and Rice, J.B. Jr. (2005), “A supply chain view of
the resilient enterprise”, MIT Sloan Management Review,
Vol. 47 No. 1, pp. 41-48.
Simangunsong, E., Hendry, L.C. and Stevenson, M. (2012),
“Supply-chain uncertainty: a review and theoretical
foundation for future research”, International Journal of
Production Research, Vol. 50 No. 16, pp. 4493-4523.
Spiegler, V.L.M., Naim, M.M. and Wikner, J. (2012), “A
control engineering approach to the assessment of supply
chain resilience”, International Journal of Production
Research, Vol. 50 No. 21, pp. 6162-6187.
Stecke, K.E. and Kumar, S. (2009), “Sources of supply chain
disruptions, factors that breed vulnerability, and mitigating
strategies”, Journal of Marketing Channels, Vol. 16 No. 3,
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)
pp. 193-226.
Szwejczewski, M., Lemke, F. and Goffin, K. (2005),
“Manufacturer-supplier relationships: an empirical study of
German manufacturing companies”, International Journal of
Operations & Production Management, Vol. 25 Nos 9/10,
pp. 875-897.
Tachizawa, E.M. and Gimenez, C. (2010), “Supply flexibility
strategies in Spanish firms: results from a survey”, International
Journal of Production Economics, Vol. 124 No. 1, pp. 214-224.
Tang, C.S. (2006a), “Perspectives in supply chain risk
management”, International Journal of Production Economics,
Vol. 103 No. 2, pp. 451-488.
Tang, C.S. (2006b), “Robust strategies for mitigating supply
chain disruptions”, International Journal of Logistics Research
and Applications: A Leading Journal of Supply Chain
Management, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 33-45.
Teece, D. (2007), “Explicating dynamic capabilities: the
nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise
performance”, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 28
No. 13, pp. 1319-1350.
Teece, D.J., Pisano, G. and Shuen, A. (1997), “Dynamic
capabilities and strategic management”, Strategic
Management Journal, Vol. 18 No. 7, pp. 509-533.
Thomé, A.M.T., Scavarda, L.F., Fernandez, N.S. and
Scavarda, A.J. (2012), “Sales and operations planning and
the firm performance”, International Journal of Productivity
and Performance Management, Vol. 61 No. 4, pp. 359-381.
Tranfield, D., Denyer, D. and Smart, P. (2003), “Towards a
methodology for developing evidence-informed
management knowledge by means of systematic review”,
British Journal of Management, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 207-222.
Tranfield, D., Denyer, D., Marcos, J. and Burr, M. (2004),
“Co-producing management knowledge”, Management
Decision, Vol. 42, Nos 3/4, pp. 375-386.
Wagner, S.M. and Bode, C. (2006), “An empirical investigation
into supply chain vulnerability”, Journal of Purchasing & Supply
Management, Vol. 12 No. 6, pp. 301-312.
World Economic Forum (2013), “Building resilience in
supply chains: an initiative of the risk response network in
collaboration with accenture”, Industrial Agenda,
Accenture, January, pp. 1-44.
To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com
Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints
642
Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
Volume 19 · Number 5/6 · 2014 · 626 –642
Yang, B. and Yang, Y. (2010), “Postponement in supply
chain risk management: a complexity perspective”,
International Journal of Production Research, Vol. 48 No. 7,
pp. 1901-1912.
Yenradee, P. and Dangton, R. (2000), “Implementation
sequence of engineering and management techniques for
enhancing the effectiveness of production and inventory
control system”, International Journal of Production Research,
Vol. 38 No. 12, pp. 2689-2707.
Yi, C.Y., Ngai, E.W.T. and Moon, K.L. (2011), “Supply
chain flexibility in an uncertain environment: exploratory
findings from five case studies”, Supply Chain Management,
Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 271-283.
Zeng, A.Z. (2000), “A synthetic study of sourcing strategies”,
Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 100 No. 5, p. 219.
Zsidisin, G.A. (2003), “Managerial perceptions of supply
risk”, Journal of Supply Chain Management, Vol. 39 No. 1,
pp. 14-25.
Zsidisin, G.A. and Wagner, S.M. (2010), “Do perceptions
become reality? The moderating role of supply chain
resiliency on disruption occurrence”, Journal of Business
Logistics, Vol. 31 No. 2, pp. 1-20.
Zsidisin, G.A., Panelli, A. and Upton, R. (2000), “Purchasing
organization involvement in risk assessments, contingency
plans, and risk management: an exploratory study”, Supply
Chain Management, Vol. 5 No. 4, pp. 187-197.
Further reading
Denyer, D. and Tranfield, D. (2009), “Producing a systematic
review”, in Buchanan, D.A. and Bryman, A. (Eds), The
Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods, Sage
Publications, London, pp. 671-689.
Gadde, L. and Hakansson, H. (2001), Supply Network
Strategies, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ.
Kraljic, P. (1983), “Purchasing must become supply management”,
Harvard Business Review, Vol. 61 No. 5, pp. 109-117.
Miles, R.E., Snow, C.C., Meyer, A.D. and
Coleman, H.J. Jr. (1978), “Organizational strategy,
structure, and process”, Academy Of Management Review,
Vol. 3 No. 3, pp. 546-562.
Peck, H. (2005), “Drivers of supply chain vulnerability: an
integrated framework”, International Journal of Physical
Distribution & Logistics Management, Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 210-232.
Schoenherr, T., Modi, S.B., Benton, W.C., Carter, C.R.,
Choi, T.Y., Larson, P.D., Leenders, M.R., Mabert, V.A.,
Narasimhan, R. and Wagner, S.M. (2012), “Research
opportunities in purchasing and supply management”,
International Journal of Production Research, Vol. 50 No. 16,
pp. 4556-4579.
Corresponding author
Carla Roberta Pereira can be contacted at: pereiracrz@
dep.ufscar.br
 This article has been cited by:

1. Imran Ali, Sev Nagalingam, Bruce Gurd. 2017. Building resilience in SMEs of perishable product supply chains: enablers, barriers
and risks. Production Planning & Control 28:15, 1236-1250. [Crossref]
2. TukamuhabwaBenjamin, Benjamin Tukamuhabwa, StevensonMark, Mark Stevenson, BusbyJerry, Jerry Busby. Supply chain
resilience in a developing country context: a case study on the interconnectedness of threats, strategies and outcomes. Supply
Chain Management: An International Journal, ahead of print. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
3. TiemanMarco, Marco Tieman. 2017. Halal risk management: combining robustness and resilience. Journal of Islamic Marketing
8:3, 461-475. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
4. JahreMarianne, Marianne Jahre. 2017. Humanitarian supply chain strategies – a review of how actors mitigate supply chain risks.
Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management 7:2, 82-101. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
5. Vipul Jain, Sameer Kumar, Umang Soni, Charu Chandra. 2017. Supply chain resilience: model development and empirical
analysis. International Journal of Production Research 34, 1-22. [Crossref]
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)

6. ChengJao-Hong, Jao-Hong Cheng, LuKuo-Liang, Kuo-Liang Lu. 2017. Enhancing effects of supply chain resilience: insights
from trajectory and resource-based perspectives. Supply Chain Management: An International Journal 22:4, 329-340. [Abstract]
[Full Text] [PDF]
7. Shyh-hwang Lee. 2017. A fuzzy multi-objective programming approach for determination of resilient supply portfolio under
supply failure risks. Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management 23:3, 211-220. [Crossref]
8. MandalSantanu, Santanu Mandal. 2017. An empirical competence-capability model of supply chain resilience. International
Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment 8:2, 190-208. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
9. Chiung-Lin Liu, Kuo-Chung Shang, Taih-Cherng Lirn, Kee-Hung Lai, Y.H. Venus Lun. 2017. Supply chain resilience, firm
performance, and management policies in the liner shipping industry. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice .
[Crossref]
10. Michael J. Maloni, Mark S. Hiatt, Joseph H. Astrachan. 2017. Supply management and family business: A review and call for
research. Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management 23:2, 123-136. [Crossref]
11. Masoud Kamalahmadi, Mahour Mellat Parast. 2017. An assessment of supply chain disruption mitigation strategies. International
Journal of Production Economics 184, 210-230. [Crossref]
12. AliAbubakar, Abubakar Ali, MahfouzAmr, Amr Mahfouz, ArishaAmr, Amr Arisha. 2017. Analysing supply chain resilience:
integrating the constructs in a concept mapping framework via a systematic literature review. Supply Chain Management: An
International Journal 22:1, 16-39. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
13. MandalSantanu, Santanu Mandal, SarathyRathin, Rathin Sarathy, KorasigaVenkateshwar Rao, Venkateshwar Rao Korasiga,
BhattacharyaSourabh, Sourabh Bhattacharya, DastidarSurajit Ghosh, Surajit Ghosh Dastidar. 2016. Achieving supply chain
resilience. International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment 7:5, 544-562. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
14. R. Rajesh. 2016. Forecasting supply chain resilience performance using grey prediction. Electronic Commerce Research and
Applications 20, 42-58. [Crossref]
15. ChowdhuryMd Maruf Hossan, Md Maruf Hossan Chowdhury, QuaddusMohammed, Mohammed Quaddus. 2016. Supply chain
readiness, response and recovery for resilience. Supply Chain Management: An International Journal 21:6, 709-731. [Abstract]
[Full Text] [PDF]
16. PournaderMehrdokht, Mehrdokht Pournader, RotaruKristian, Kristian Rotaru, KachAndrew Philip, Andrew Philip Kach, Razavi
HajiaghaSeyed Hossein, Seyed Hossein Razavi Hajiagha. 2016. An analytical model for system-wide and tier-specific assessment of
resilience to supply chain risks. Supply Chain Management: An International Journal 21:5, 589-609. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
17. Mohamad Asrul Mustapha, Zainuddin Abdul Manan, Sharifah Rafidah Wan Alwi. 2016. Sustainable Green Management System
(SGMS) – An integrated approach towards organisational sustainability. Journal of Cleaner Production . [Crossref]
18. Tracy L. Gonzalez-Padron. 2016. Ethics in the Supply Chain: Follow-Up Processes to Audit Results. Journal of Marketing
Channels 23:1-2, 22-33. [Crossref]
19. V.L.M. Spiegler, A.T. Potter, M.M. Naim, D.R. Towill. 2016. The value of nonlinear control theory in investigating the
underlying dynamics and resilience of a grocery supply chain. International Journal of Production Research 54:1, 265-286. [Crossref]
20. Masoud Kamalahmadi, Mahour Mellat Parast. 2016. A review of the literature on the principles of enterprise and supply
chain resilience: Major findings and directions for future research. International Journal of Production Economics 171, 116-133.
[Crossref]
21. Ran Bhamra, Kevin Burnard, Samir Dani. Resilience: The Concept, a Literature Review and Future Directions 3-30. [Crossref]
 22. Peter Trkman, Marko Budler, Aleš Groznik. 2015. A business model approach to supply chain management. Supply Chain
Management: An International Journal 20:6, 587-602. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
Downloaded by CHINHOYI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY LIBRARY At 08:05 25 October 2017 (PT)