Managing Supply Chain Disruption by Collaborative Resource Sharing

The highly interconnected and global supply chains have faced tremendous challenges since 2019. Global conflicts, natural disasters, wars, and the COVID-19 pandemic repeatedly cause supply chain disruptions and pose major challenges for the globalized supply networks in regard to robustness and resilience. The increasing interconnectivity makes supply chains more vulnerable to disruption and it seems that the proverbial stone that falls into the water actually causes a flood at the other end of the supply chain. This enhances the requirement for an effective risk management. Based on a survey of 216 supply chain risk managers of European production firms, this study introduces the collaborative sharing of production and human resources as a method to recover from disruptions. Thereby, trust and commitment are identified as the core values for collaborative resource sharing to increase supply chain resilience. We propose a framework to explicate the main drivers for collaborative human resource and production sharing and give first practical recommendations for supply chain risk managers to support the process of the development of mitigation strategies to recover from supply chain disruptions.