Managing Supply Chain Resilience Through Reactive Recovery Strategies Within the Automobile Industry : A Qualitative Study on Lessons Learned from the Covid-19 Pandemic

The global nature of current supply chains – in combination with disruptive events like the Covid-19 pandemic – has highlighted the need for increased supply chain resilience (SCRes). Contemporary research has primarily focused on proactive SCRes strategies and, to some degree, neglected the reactive strategies for building SCRes. As pro- and reactive measures are needed for building SCRes, the study explores how businesses employ reactive SCRes recovery strategies to handle extreme supply chain disruption (SCD). One sector of the economy experiencing SCD as an effect of the Coronavirus is the automobile industry, which is generally used to measure international health. With the exploratory nature of the purpose and the influential role of the automobile industry, the study employed a qualitative methodology where the strategies utilized by automobile industry actors are used as the case to discover and contribute with empirical evidence for reactive SCRes strategies. The empirical data was derived through semi-structured interviews with supply chain executives from the automobile industry. The findings indicate that companies within the automobile industry employ three main reactive SCRes strategies: communication, crisis teams, and workforce measures, to handle the adverse outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic. Moreover, the results suggest that crucial organizational capabilities are flexibility and velocity to handle turmoil within supply chains. Furthermore, based on a holistic perspective, the study indicates that the four formative capabilities of SCRes: flexibility, velocity, visibility, and collaboration, along with pro- and reactive SCRes strategies, are interconnected. As such, all capabilities appear to be pervading in the three reactive SCRes strategies. The study, therefore, implies that all capabilities of SCRes and both pro- and reactive strategies are necessary for the development of more resilient supply chains