ABSTRACT
The current COVID-19 pandemic has virtually disrupted supply chains worldwide. Thus, supply chain research has received significant attention. While the impacts have been immeasurable, organizations have realized the need to design strategies to overcome such unexpected events. Therefore, the supply chain research landscape has evolved to address the challenges during the pandemic. However, available literature surveys have not explored the power of text analytics. Hence, in this review, an analysis of the supply chain literature related to the impacts of COVID-19 is performed to identify the current research trends and future research avenues. To discover the frequent topics discussed in the literature, bibliometric analysis (i.e., keyword co-occurrence network) and text mining tools (i.e., N-gram analysis and topic modeling) are employed for the whole corpus and the top-three contributing journals (i.e., Sustainability, International Journal of Logistics Management, Operations Management Research). Moreover, text analytics (i.e., Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency: TF-IDF) is utilized to discover the distinctive topics in the corpus and per journals. A total of 574 papers published up to the first semester of 2022 were collected from the Scopus database to determine the research trends and opportunities. The keyword network identified four clusters considering the implementation of digitalization to achieve resilience and sustainability, the usage of additive manufacturing during the pandemic, the study of food supply chains, and the development of supply chain decision models to tackle the pandemic. Moreover, the segmented keyword network analysis and topic modeling were performed for the top three contributors. Although both analyses draw the research concentrations per journal, the keyword network tends to provide a more general scope, while the topic modeling gives more specific topics. Furthermore, TF-IDF scores unveiled topics rarely studied, such as the implications of the pandemic on plasma supply chains, cattle supply chains, and reshoring decisions, to mention a few. Additionally, it was observed how the different methodologies implemented allowed to complement the information provided by each method. Based on the findings, future research avenues are discussed. Therefore, this research will help supply chain practitioners and researchers to identify supply chain advancements, gaps in the literature and future research streams.
ABSTRACT
Background: Unexpected events or major supply chain disruptions have demonstrated the vulnerability in which supply chains operate. While supply chains are usually prepared for operational disruptions, unexpected or black swan events are widely disregarded, as there is no reliable way to forecast them. However, this kind of event could rapidly and seriously deteriorate supply chain performance, and ignoring that possibility could lead to devastating consequences. Methods: In this paper, definitions of major disruptions and the methods to cope with them are studied. Additionally, a methodology to develop supply chain resilience roadmaps is conceptualised by analysing existing literature to help plan for unexpected events. Results: The methodology is introduced to create roadmaps comprises several stages, including supply chain exploration, scenario planning, system analysis, definition of strategies, and signal monitoring. Each roadmap contains the description of a plausible future in terms of supply chain disruptions and the strategies to implement to help mitigate negative impacts. Conclusions: The creation of roadmaps calls for an anticipatory mindset from all members along the supply chain. The roadmaps development establishes the foundations for a holistic supply chain disruption preparation and analysis.