Building Supply Chain Resilience with Digital Technologies: A Qualitative Analysis

The capacity of businesses to produce and distribute their goods has been significantly hampered by a variety of extensive challenges, such as epidemics, energy crises, political unrest, terrorism, and even wars.International trade sanctions have further amplified firms' difficulties to procure inputs from foreign markets.Both globally fragmented production chains and firms without direct involvement in foreign activities have been affected by the consequences spread across entire supply networks.In this context, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the current effectiveness of business software solutions in enhancing supply chain resilience (SCRES).The study draws on a range of literature sources that outline key traits and strategies that make a supply chain resilient.Subsequently, a series of interviews with supply chain managers from various countries and economic sectors were conducted to assess to what extent the SCRES requirements identified in the literature are met by the technologies they use.The qualitative analysis findings show that digital technologies play a key role in enhancing supply chain resilience by supporting critical capabilities such as supplier diversification, collaboration, visibility, flexibility, operational efficiency, risk management, forecasting, and agility.The interviews, which were processed in a thematic analysis, highlight that the current trends favour the use of collaboration platforms between business partners and the expansion of business networks, although increased transparency can both ease the processes and create tensions among users.Furthermore, as the volume of digitally processed data grows, the need for software integration and human intervention also increases to ensure the accuracy of the data in the system.The originality of this study lies in its integrated analysis of multiple SCRES strategies, with a focus on those that can be implemented through business software solutions and emerging organisational technologies, as well as their limitations, the preconditions required to achieve the desired outcomes, and the interdependencies among the diverse effects they generate.