COVID-19 pandemic disruption: a matter of building companies' internal and external resilience

This paper develops an integrated methodology aimed at diagnosing supply chain resilience in terms of (1) internal dynamic capabilities of an enterprise, and (2) resilience of its suppliers. In addition, unlike other research, it integrates the suppliers' resilience evaluation into the order size allocation plan. Multi-attribute decision making (MADM) algorithms were employed to quantify the relative importance to evaluate the internal and external resilience of an enterprise. Furthermore, the MADM output was combined with a multi-objective programming model formulated to solve the order size problem considering economic and resilience objectives. The applicability of the developed methodology is demonstrated via a dairy manufacturing enterprise that suffered from disruptions attributed to COVID-19. The results translate the enterprise's non-viable manufacturing due to its poor external and internal resilience profiles. It is emphasized that if an enterprise fails to develop internal capabilities such as readiness and sensing, the enterprise could also fail in managing external resilience. A resilient supply chain requires a blend of internal and external resilience. This work represents the first quantitative attempt to provide a unified methodology for identifying and measuring internal and external resilience.

Automated summary

This paper develops an integrated methodology for diagnosing supply chain resilience by incorporating the evaluation of suppliers' resilience and integrating it into the order size allocation plan. Multi-attribute decision making algorithms are used to quantify the relative importance of internal and external resilience of an enterprise. The results demonstrate the importance of a combination of internal and external resilience in a resilient supply chain.