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The present study considers disruption in the buyer–supplier–supplier triad. This triad has a common second-tier supplier as the disruption source, which gives us the tetradic context. The goal is to advance the knowledge on how a first-tier supplier's resilience against lower-tier disruptive events can be developed through horizontally connecting with the other first-tier supplier and how the buyer can benefit from its first-tier suppliers' resilience capability.

Data from 33 triads was collected and analyzed.

As predicted, coopetition between two first-tier suppliers increases the first-tier supplier's capability to be resilient to disruptive events emanating from a lower tier source. However, contrary to initial theorization, the first-tier supplier's resilience capability affects the buyer's performance during disruptive events negatively. With increasing buyer–supplier social bonds, this negative relationship can partly be alleviated.

Analyzing resilience within a triad to a disruption in the tetradic context reveals unexpected dynamics. Individual supplier's resilience may have a negative impact on the buyer's resilience in certain disruption events.

The buyer can increase collective suppliers' resilience through establishing horizontal links. To prevent becoming a victim of the supplier's resilience in the event of a second-tier disruption, a buyer needs to become a member of the supplier's relational network.

We propose that resilience can rest with the suppliers. This observation has implications for the buyer when selecting and coordinating suppliers. Further, it considers a context beyond a triad by venturing into the tetradic context. We anticipate more studies in tetrads in future and this study can serve as a bridge.

Firms are increasingly required to make ethical choices when selecting suppliers for their supply chains, and the decisions often rest on individual purchasing managers within the firm. This study builds on the literature on ethical decision-making and the concept of decision frames to investigate the decision-making process of purchasing managers in financially distressed firms. Codes of Conduct (CoC) and how they are enforced (financial rewards and codified procedures for oversight) are studied in terms of their effectiveness in informing and guiding purchasing managers in their supplier selection decisions.

Four sequential experiments were conducted with a total of 648 purchasing managers from manufacturing firms.

The results indicate that purchasing managers in firms facing financial distress are more than four times more likely than purchasing managers in the control groups to select the less ethical supplier in favor of better operational performance. As a potential remedy, it is found that enforcing the firm's CoC help to counteract this tendency and increase ethical supplier selection decisions by 2.1- to 2.6-fold. However, CoC enforcement that invokes multiple conflicting decision frames simultaneously is more likely to impair than promote ethical supplier selection decisions, compared to situations where only one enforcement method is present.

These findings develop an improved understanding of purchasers' decision-making processes and shed light on how to effectively use CoCs to guide these decisions.

This editorial for the 6th World Conference on Production and Operations Management (P&OM) 2022 Special Issue delves into the transformative role of advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbots in reshaping operations, supply chain management and logistics (OSCM). It aligns with the conference’s theme of exploring the intersection between P&OM and strategy during the Technological Revolution.

Utilizing a conceptual approach, this paper introduces the “ERI Framework,” a tool designed to evaluate the impact of AI-driven chatbots in three critical operational dimensions: efficiency (E), responsiveness (R) and intelligence (I). This framework is grounded in disruptive debottlenecking theory and real-world applications, offering a novel structure for analysis.

The conceptual analysis suggests immediate benefits of chatbots in enhancing decision-making and resource allocation, thereby alleviating operational bottlenecks. However, it sees challenges such as workforce adaptation and potential impacts on creativity and sustainability.

The paper suggests that while chatbots present opportunities for optimizing operational processes, organizations must thoughtfully address the emerging challenges to maintain productivity and foster innovation. Strategic implementation and employee training are highlighted as key factors for successful integration.

Bridging the gap between the burgeoning proliferation of chatbots and their practical implications in OSCM, this paper offers a first perspective on the role of AI chatbots in modern business environments. By providing insights into both the benefits and challenges of chatbot integration, it offers a preliminary view essential for academics and practitioners in the digital age.

This study aims to investigate the effects of temporary workers and works councils on process innovations at manufacturing sites. The impact of temporary workers, commonly viewed as a means of operational flexibility and cost savings, on firms’ ability to innovate is underexplored. Works councils represent and help integrate temporary workers, but are often equated with unions, which have been criticized as barriers to innovation, especially in the US.

The authors use secondary data collected by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) of the German Federal Employment Agency. Specifically, the authors conduct a series of regression analyses using 11-year panel data covering the period 2009–2019 with 11,641 manufacturing site-year observations.

The results suggest that the use of temporary workers initially promotes process innovation, but at too high a level, it impairs firms’ ability to innovate. Furthermore, the results suggest that works councils have a positive impact on innovation and dampen the curvilinear effect found with respect to temporary workers.

Research has largely focused on the cost and flexibility benefits of temporary workers. The authors analyze the effectiveness of temporary workers in terms of innovativeness. By including works councils, the study also consider the contextual environment in which temporary workers are employed. Finally, the results reject the assumption that works councils have a similar negative impact as unions on innovation; in fact, the authors find the opposite.

This study is intended to motivate and guide future researchers to rethink and update their theories of operational capability development. By examining the extensive body of research on operational capabilities and working closely with an industry partner, the authors are iteratively developing new thinking about why our existing models seem to be failing and what aspects are likely to be useful in updating them.

This pathway paper is based on observations gained through a structured literature review, close collaboration with an industry partner and discussions with other industry partners and executives.

The authors identify ways in which the operations management community could begin to challenge and expand existing models of operational capability development. They provide reflections on the network structure of operational capabilities, i.e. their interconnectedness and interactions, which are likely to evolve dynamically over time and have not yet been part of the authors’ thinking about operational capability development.

The authors hope to stimulate new research through this pathway paper. By synthesizing their existing knowledge of operational capabilities and collaborating with an industry partner, the authors have attempted to highlight their limited knowledge of capability development. In addition, the authors offer several opportunities to rethink their existing models.

The purpose of this paper is to provide groundwork for an emerging theory of supply chain robustness – which has been conceptualized as a dimension of supply chain resilience – through reviewing and synthesizing related yet disconnected studies. The paper develops a formal definition of supply chain robustness to build a framework that captures the dimensions, antecedents and moderators of the construct as discussed in the literature.

The authors apply a systematic literature review approach. In order to reduce researcher bias, they involve a team of academics, librarians and managers.

The paper first, provides a formal definition of supply chain robustness; second, builds a theoretical framework of supply chain robustness that augments both causal and descriptive knowledge; third,shows how findings in this review support practice; and fourth,reveals methodological insights on the use of journal rankings in reviews.

At this stage, managers may benefit from seeing these relationships as clues derived from the literature. The paper is fundamentally a call for researchers to conduct quantitative testing of such relationships to derive more reliable understanding and practical applications.

Rather than presenting empirical findings, this paper reveals to managers that visibility, risk management orientation and reduced network complexity have been the main predictive antecedents of supply chain robustness (as discussed in the academic literature). This provides a potentially important signal as to where to invest resources.

The study is the first to develop a formal definition of supply chain robustness and to establish a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the construct.

Any negative impact of disruptions to supply chain operations can be minimized when different members across the chain collaborate effectively. Firms should, therefore, invest appropriately to develop requisite interpersonal skills and associated capabilities. Such measures enable leaders to develop and enhance the relational and redeployable resilience needed to better combat risks and threats that emerge.

The purpose of this study is to identify the prescribed formative elements of supply chain resilience (SCR) in literature, to compare them with the unique characteristics of high reliability organisations (HROs) and derive lessons useful for improving SCR.

Two systematic literature reviews are carried out as follows: one on SCR and the other on HRO, which identified 107 studies and 18 papers, respectively. The results from the review are presented, analysed and synthesised.

Findings suggest that despite significant similarities in some of the proposed formative elements for SCR and the characteristics of HROs, the strong managerial commitment exhibited in HROs is absent in SCR literature. More importantly, the most cited characteristic of HROs, which is their flexible decision making structure is pointed out as a prima lesson towards developing resilience in supply chains.

A decision making framework to facilitate flexible decision making for supply chains during crisis is presented. Further, practical lessons are pointed out from principles common to both streams of literature such as redundancy, human resource management, collaboration, agility, flexibility, culture and risk avoidance that can be implemented in supply chains.

This paper is the first study to systematically review HROs, adapt a HRO decision making framework and also apply the Cynefin framework to SCR. This, therefore, provides the basis to launch further research into the use of these theories and the role of decision-making in SCR creation.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused global supply disruptions and shortages that resulted in countries battling over desperately needed (medical) supplies. In this mayhem, additive manufacturing (AM) provided relief to the strained healthcare systems and manufacturing environments by offering an alternative way to rapidly produce desired products. This study sheds light on how AM was used globally in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study undertakes a systematic and content-centric review of 289 additively manufactured products made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, quantitative frequency-based text mining and various descriptive analyses were applied that support the investigation of the subject under regard.

Results show that AM was primarily used in the medical domain for the production of standard medical items, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) but also for non-obvious and new applications (e.g. swab simulator, rapid diagnostic kits, etc.). Also, certain paradigm shifts were observed, as the effective move to mass production and the mitigation of problems related to certification and standardization emerged as prominent management prospects. Nevertheless, various obstacles arose and remained in the path of lasting AM success, especially with respect to print quality, raw material supply and technological versatility.

Due to the actuality of the topic under investigation, no comparable study has so far been conducted. The systematic review provides a conclusive and precise foundation for further analysis and subsequent discussions. Additionally, no comparable study mapping such a wide array of different AM products exists today.

The concept of robustness in manufacturing is not easy to capture and even harder to quantify. This paper elaborates an approach to assess robustness in production systems from a holistic input-throughput-output perspective using a pragmatic robustness indicator.

First, in order to have a precise understanding of what needs to be measured, a concept of robustness in production systems is defined based on a literature overview. Three different aspects are considered to be essential to comprehensively describe robustness in production: the deviations of input resources, of performance and of output. These aspects are translated into an aggregated indicator based on developments of production costs, order delays and output volumes. The indicator-based assessment approach is eventually applied to a flow-shop scheduling case study in the chipboard industry.

The study shows that an assessment of robustness should not solely focus on a single aspect of a production system. Instead, a holistic view is required addressing the tradeoffs that robustness must balance, such as the one between the realized performance, the corresponding resource requirements and the resulting output. Furthermore, the study emphasizes that robustness can be interpreted as a superior system capability that builds upon flexibility, agility, resilience and resistance.

First, the paper is a call to further test and validate the proposed approach in industry case studies. Second, the paper suggests a modified understanding of robustness in production systems in which not only the deviation of one single variable is of interest but also the behavior of the whole system.

The approach allows practitioners to pragmatically evaluate a production system’s robustness level while quickly identifying drivers, barriers and tradeoffs.

Compared to existing assessment approaches the proposed methodology is one of the first that evaluates robustness in production systems from a holistic input-throughput-output perspective highlighting the different tradeoffs that have to be balanced. It is based upon a comprehensive concept of robustness which also links robustness to adjacent capabilities that were otherwise only treated separately.