Supply Chain Resilience strategies to cope with COVID-19 pandemic. An empirical analysis in Italian firms

Coronavirus COVID-19 represents one of the most disruptive events that have characterized modern supply chains over the last decades, influencing a reconfiguration of sourcing strategies and supply chain design in most of the industries. The existing studies on this topic are still largely focused on theoretical contributions and case studies, advocating in-depth analysis on how firms are practically adopting supply chain risk mitigation approaches to reengineer and adapt supply chains to future challenges. The scope of this paper is twofold. First, the paper proposes a theoretical framework, based on a literature review, that analyzes the links between COVID-19 impacts and supply chain resilience capabilities, e.g., flexibility, efficiency, agility, responsiveness, investigating the role of digital technologies as a potential key resource to improve the effectiveness of supply chain resilience, under the lens of key capabilities. Second, the paper empirically tests the framework by analyzing - through a semi-quantitative method - a set of primary data collected in a sample of 164 Italian companies, where key respondents are mainly supply chain managers, purchasing managers and logistics managers from several industries.