Food Network Resilience Against Natural Disasters: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

We propose a conceptual framework that highlights the importance of logistics, collaboration, sourcing, and knowledge management in achieving supply chain resilience. This framework is developed after extensive literature review of relief supply chains, supply chain resilience, and disaster management disciplines. This review reveals that our understanding of supply chain resilience for food supply chains in a disaster scenario is still in its infancy. We note the lack of any consolidated framework or generalized theory in this area. Different topics related to resilience are usually discussed in isolation; hence, this research has attempted to combine different concepts drawn from various areas into one framework. We postulate that food supply chains can develop certain capabilities such as agility, adaptability, and alignment within the four supply chain domains of logistics, collaboration, sourcing, and knowledge management. Supply chain orientation and risk management culture plays the facilitating role in this framework. Adopting this systems approach would allow greater insights into how food supply chains can become more resilient to natural disasters.

A Conceptual Framework to Manage Resilience and Increase Sustainability in the Supply Chain

“…Generally, companies set their objectives in isolation, and these objectives must be adapted and aligned with the strategic objectives established for the global supply chain [2,32,46,173]. These objectives should incorporate the three types of sustainability objectives coming from the economic, environmental, and social dimensions, as well as the objectives to manage the resilience elements.…”

“…These previous articles focus their research on defining resilience and describing the principles that integrate resilience [4,24,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34], strategies to recover from disruptive events [1,30,33,35], and the qualitative and quantitative methods for measuring resilience [28,[36][37][38]. Eight out of sixteen papers reviewed [24,26,[30][31][32][33]37,38] developed a conceptual framework for resilience management. The analysis of the previous literature is presented in Table A1 of the Appendix A, and it is structured by search horizon (range), number of papers analyzed, keywords, databases consulted, and whether the article presents a proposal of a conceptual framework.…”

“…The results were summarized in Table A2 of the Appendix A. The new elements of resilience identified are: Robustness [30][31][32][33]137,138,[163][164][165][166][167]; contingency planning [2,[31][32][33]37,137,157,[167][168][169][170]; disruptive environment awareness [29,31,33,37,157,165,[169][170][171]; knowledge management [29,[31][32][33]37,163,165,169,172]; market adaptation [2,33,163,169,170]; and strategic alignment [32,173].…”

“…Robustness and contingency planning help maximize the benefits of flexibility and redundancy, and increase the supply chain's ability to maintain normal operations after a disruptive event [31,165]. Strategic alignment is added to the principle of collaboration, as it the system's ability to integrate business objectives and coordinate the way actions are implemented [32,173]. Strategic alignment is based on the elements of shared information and trust among the members of the chain.…”

“…These two elements, together with innovation and leadership, allow the members of the supply chain to recognize the existence of possible disruptions and develop actions aimed at avoiding or reducing the effects [29,31,33,165,170]. Additionally, based on the experience, these elements generate learning and actions for future situations, including management capability, so that their human resources are trained, coached, and evaluated for increasing performance if a disruptive event happens [29,31,32,163,169,172]. The principle of SCRM culture is considered to be transversal to the development of resilient capabilities in supply chains.…”