Can you measure resilience if you are unable to define it? The analysis of Supply Network Resilience (SNRES)

ABSTRACTThe increasing importance of resilience in supply chain management (SCM) has driven managers and scholars to seek ways to evaluate it. However, in the SCM literature, the conceptualisation of what resilience is and how supply chains are resilient in practice remains vague, which makes measuring it difficult. Based on an analysis of what resilience and being resilient means in different disciplines, combined with extant SCM literature about resilience, this paper clarifies the concept and posits that resilience, in the SCM context, is a process combining three interactive capabilities that operates at three intertwined levels of organisation: firm, supply chain and supply network. This multi-level analysis gives rise to a framework of overall supply network resilience (SNRES) that provides insights for both academics and practitioners and also leads to a useful analytical approach to evaluate resilience at different levels of a supply network.