Prioritising Visibility Influencing Factors in Supply Chains for Resilience

Abstract

Supply chain resilience is essential, especially in helping supply chains prepare, react, and grow from supply chain disruptions. Competencies required to generate supply chain performance through resilience include, amongst others, visibility, digital technologies, and supply chain relationships. Supply chain visibility is the ability of the supply chain to see clearly from one end to another whilst sharing information that is key or useful to the stakeholders in the chain. Effective management of supply chain visibility can result in a competitive advantage. This requires knowledge and understanding of the factors influencing visibility and appropriate prioritisation of the factors. This paper presents a method of prioritising visibility influence factors (VIFs) in supply chains and resilience. It adopts a fuzzy logic approach and explores prioritisation from two main perspectives: a) supply chain managers included more towards digital technologies perspectives (DTP), and b) supply chain managers included more towards supply chain relationship perspectives (SCRP). Remarkably, notable differences were found between the VIF priorities of the DTP vs the SCRP supply chain managers. Automation, context awareness, dynamic capability, absorptive capacity, and information management were top VIF priorities for the DTP managers. Supply chain relationships, nature of management, Resources, Linkages, and Laws, policies and standards came tops as VIFs to prioritise for the SCRP manager. Interestingly, both the DTP and SCRP participants in the study attach somewhat similar views on priorities regarding motives, information sharing, interoperability, integration and connectivity of information technologies. There are reasonable arguments in support of the viewpoints. Appropriate good balance may need to be sought between the DTP and the SCRP perspectives when prioritising the VIFs for resilience.