Refining Strategic Procurement and Supply Chain Management for post-COVID-19 Resilience: A Systematic Review

Abstract

While strategic procurement and supply chain function had evolved to achieve a level of complexity that was deemed favourable for global value chains, much of the complexity was not fashioned to withstand global supply chain disruptions. Long hailed strategic procurement and supply chain practices as effective and cost-efficient collapsed in the face of COVID-19, leaving massive global supply chain disruptions. This paper: (i)identifies strategic supply chain management practices that increased firms’ vulnerability to supply chain disruptions caused by COVID-19; (ii) reports the performance of strategic supply chain management under COVID-19 pandemic; and, (iii) identifies how strategic supply chain management may be refined post-COVID-19. This was achieved through a systematic literature review where two keywords namely supply chain and supply chain resilience, were used to search for empirical studies published between 2020 and 2021. The search was conducted on PubMed Central, Google Scholar, Taylor and Francis. The initial search in all the databases yielded over 200,000 articles, but only 125 articles containing at least the two keywords in the title were selected. Out of 125, only 69 were retained after eliminating duplicates, systematic literature reviews and articles not available in full text to the authors. A thorough review of the title and abstract was done on the 69 retained, and 21 articles were excluded based on title, while 25 on the abstract, leaving 23 articles. The remaining 23 articles were read in full and 21 articles selected due to their ability to answer the pre-determined research questions. Four industry reports searched on google were also involved, leading to a total of 25 articles systematically reviewed. The findings indicate that post-COVID-19, firms are likely to embrace supply chain management practices that enhance resiliency over efficiency. As such, just-in-time may be replaced by just-in-case practices such as redundant inventory, extra production capacity, and multiple sourcing among others. Therefore, the study recommends that in the post-COVID-19 pandemic, companies should seek to balance efficiency with resiliency, rather than trading off one over the other.