Kim van Oorschot: "Unravelling the Dynamics of Supply Chain Resilience: A Process Model"

Co-authors: Kostas Selviaridis, Nonhlanhla Dube, Marianne Jahre

There has been a surge of government policies and corporate strategies internationally to improve the resilience of critical supply chains in a wide range of sectors, including healthcare and pharmaceuticals (Harland et al., 2021). Wieland et al. (2023) stress three resilience forms: persistence, adaptation, and transformation. Persistence is related to robustness and redundancy principles. Adaptation and transformation are based on flexibility and the ability to effect radical changes, respectively. Resilience has gained much traction in the OSCM domain. Yet, we still know very little about how supply chain resilience and its multiple forms (e.g., persistence and adaptation) may evolve over time and become more or less prevalent in the face of ongoing threats/risks and actual disruptions. A focus on the dynamic interplay of different forms of resilience is theoretically and practically significant because it can reveal the processes underpinning the development and evolution of resilience strategies (e.g., based on redundancy vs. flexibility). In this study, we address the following question: How and why do shifts between different forms of supply chain resilience occur in the face of changing circumstances?

We combined a single, longitudinal case covering a ten-year period (2015-2024) with casual loop diagramming (CLD) to examine the evolution of supply chain resilience in the context of UK medicine supply. Our setting provided a unique opportunity to follow and track how the National Health Service (NHS) – as a buying organization – and pharmaceutical suppliers responded to overlapping disruptions related to Brexit, COVID-19 and other, less impactful or local events (e.g., US hurricanes in the Fall of 2024). We collected data through 42 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders such as Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), NHS England, manufacturers, wholesalers, and 13 hospitals, over a period of 49 months (November 2020 – December 2024).

Our preliminary findings demonstrate turning points, over time, in the prevalence between different forms of supply chain resilience. These observed change patterns and dynamics of supply chain resilience are primarily underlined by a dialectical process (Van de Ven & Poole, 1995) involving conflicts, negotiations and compromises, primarily between the NHS and DHSC on the one hand, and suppliers of medicines on the other. We build on these qualitative findings to develop a process model of the dynamics of supply chain resilience, using a CLD approach.

We contribute to the supply chain resilience literature by elucidating the dynamics of resilience and theorizing the change processes underlying shifting emphasis between persistence and adaptation forms.

Dr. Kim van Oorschot is Professor in the Department of Accounting and Operations Management at the BI Norwegian Business School. Her current research focuses on decision-making, trade-offs, and tipping points in dynamically complex settings, like supply chains, and new product development projects. Her research projects are aimed at discovering so-called ‘decision traps': decisions that seem to be good on the short term but have counterproductive effects on the long term. For this purpose, she develops system dynamics models based on data from organizations. She also teaches system dynamics, operations and supply chain management, and project management to executive and master students. Kim van Oorschot has published in such journals as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Global Strategy Journal, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of the Operational Research Society, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Journal of Management Studies, and Decision Sciences.