Exploring pillars of supply chain competitiveness: insights from leading global supply chains

Funding Information: The authors acknowledge receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article: This work was supported by the Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond (AUFF) of Aarhus University. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.This paper aims to explore key pillars of supply chain competitiveness (SCC) and understand how top supply chains remain competitive in the long term. The research design is divided into two phases. First, an extensive review of the scholarly SCC literature is conducted to identify the core pillars that help achieve SCC. Second, the literature published in practitioner outlets on the five selected companies of Gartner’s Supply Chain Top 25 is scrutinized to understand how top supply chains apply the core pillars of SCC in practice. A total of 193 scientific and practitioner articles were analyzed to develop the key pillars of SCC. This study identified six key pillars of SCC in the literature: innovation, sustainability, collaboration, information technology, agility, and flexibility. It has been found that a combination of these pillars, if not all, will be required to remain competitive in the post-COVID-19 era.Peer reviewe