Toward a Resilient Holistic Supply Chain Network System: Concept, Review and Future Direction

The recent financial crisis and other major crises have suggested that there are some strong interactions and interdependence between several supply chains and their external environments in various ways. A set of supply chains that are interdependent is called a holistic supply chain network (H-SCN) in this paper. There is a need to focus on building the resilience (in short, the ability of a system to recover from damage or disruption) of an entire H-SCN as it is believed that such a network system is strongly relevant to the recent economic recession that is triggered by financial crises. The objectives of this paper are to provide a classification of different SCNs in literature, leading to the identification of a new type of SCN system, i.e., an H-SCN, and to discuss the state of knowledge on the resilience of SCNs, particularly of an H-SCN. A systematic review approach is applied in this paper. Another contribution of this paper is the provision of a more comprehensive definition and description of resilient systems, including SCN systems. A final contribution of this paper is the proposal of the future directions of research on resilient SCN systems, particularly resilient H-SCN systems.