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An emerging body of literature has pinpointed the role of supply chain structure in influencing the extent to which supply chain members disclose information about their internal practices and performance. Nevertheless, empirical research investigating the effects of firm-level relational embeddedness on network-level transparency still lags. Drawing on social network analysis, this research examines the effect of relational embeddedness on supply chain transparency and the contingent role of digitalization in the context of environmental, social and governance (ESG) information disclosure.

In their empirical analysis, the authors collected secondary data from the Bloomberg database about 2,229 firms and 14,007 ties organized in 107 extended supply chains. The authors employed supplier and customer concentration metrics to measure relational embeddedness and performed multiple econometric models to test the hypothesis.

The authors found a positive effect of supplier concentration on supply chain transparency, but the effect of customer concentration was not significant. Additionally, the digitalization of focal firms reinforced the impact of supplier concentration on supply chain transparency.

The study findings contribute by underscoring the critical effect of relational embeddedness on supply chain transparency, extending prior literature on social network analysis, providing compelling evidence for the intersection of digitalization and supply chain management, and drawing important implications for practices.

This study has conducted exploratory research to understand who should comprise the members of a resilient supply chain for promoting an entrepreneurial ecosystem of a startup project and to determine the mechanisms for the balanced coexistence of all stakeholders. This is necessary to ensure mutual benefits for all stakeholders, each of whom has multidimensional interests. Additionally, this supply chain must be able to withstand any potential disruption risks.

This research has employed a mixed-design approach. In this context, the study conducted an extensive qualitative and quantitative investigation, including 30 interviews and a survey involving 180 potential stakeholders in this supply network, respectively in the capital city of Bangladesh, Dhaka. The analysis of the interviews utilized principles of matrix thinking, while structural equation modeling (SEM) through LISREL was employed to understand cause-and-effect relationships.

Network, platform and governance—these three independent constructs have the potential to contribute to the dependent construct, a resilient supply chain, aimed at promoting an entrepreneurial ecosystem for startup projects. It has been revealed that the management of such projects depends on the rules and regulations within the ecosystem. An excellent governance mechanism is essential for this purpose. To facilitate coexistence, the establishment of a platform is crucial, where cooperation among all members is mandatory.

For practitioners, three distinctive but closely interdependent issues are explored and resolved in this philanthropic study. It has unfolded the elements of any startup project with essential settings.

The identification of the structural dynamics of potential stakeholders within the entrepreneurial ecosystem of startups is largely absent in existing literature. Therefore, there is a need to comprehensively investigate the entire network, including their roles, responsibilities and associations. This study makes a significant and novel contribution to the existing literature. Academics and practitioners alike have ample opportunities to learn from this new aspect of relationships across three distinct areas: the entrepreneurial ecosystem, startup projects and the development of a resilient supply chain.

Distribution network design involves a set of strategic decisions in supply chains because of their long-term impacts on the total logistics cost and environment. To incorporate a trade-off between financial and environmental aspects of these decisions, this paper aims to determine an optimal location, among candidate locations, of a new logistics center, its capacity, as well as optimal network flows for an existing distribution network, while concurrently minimizing the total logistics cost and gas emission. In addition, uncertainty in transportation and warehousing costs are considered.

The problem is formulated as a fuzzy multiobjective mathematical model. The effectiveness of this model is demonstrated using an industrial case study. The problem instance is a four-echelon distribution network with 22 products and a planning horizon of 20 periods. The model is solved by using the min–max and augmented ε-constraint methods with CPLEX as the solver. In addition to illustrating model’s applicability, the effect of choosing a new warehouse in the model is investigated through a scenario analysis.

For the applicability of the model, the results indicate that the augmented ε-constraint approach provides a set of Pareto solutions, which represents the ideal trade-off between the total logistics cost and gas emission. Through a case study problem instance, the augmented ε-constraint approach is recommended for similar network design problems. From a scenario analysis, when the operational cost of the new warehouse is within a specific fraction of the warehousing cost of third-party warehouses, the solution with the new warehouse outperforms that without the new warehouse with respective to financial and environmental objectives.

The proposed model is an effective decision support tool for management, who would like to assess the impact of network planning decisions on the performance of their supply chains with respect to both financial and environmental aspects under uncertainty.

This study aims to minimize the cost and time of blood delivery in the whole blood supply chain network (BSCN) in disaster conditions. In other words, integrating all strategic, tactical and operational decisions of three levels of blood collection, processing and distribution leads to satisfying the demand at the right time.

This paper proposes an integrated BSCN in disaster conditions to consider four categories of facilities, including temporary blood collection centers, field hospitals, main blood processing centers and medical centers, to optimize demand response time appropriately. The proposed model applies the location of all permanent and emergency facilities in three levels: blood collection, processing and distribution. Other essential decisions, including multipurpose facilities, emergency transportation, inventory and allocation, were also used in the model. The LP metric method is applied to solve the proposed bi-objective mathematical model for the BSCN.

The findings show that this model clarifies its efficiency in the total cost and blood delivery time reduction, which results in a low carbon transmission of the blood supply chain.

The researchers proposed an integrated BSCN in disaster conditions to minimize the cost and time of blood delivery. They considered multipurpose capabilities for facilities (e.g. field hospitals are responsible for the three purposes of blood collection, processing and distribution), and so locating permanent and emergency facilities at three levels of blood collection, processing and distribution, support facilities, emergency transportation and traffic on the route with pollution were used to present a new model.

The various quality improvement (QI) frameworks and maturity models described in the health services literature consider some aspects of QI while excluding others. This paper aims to present a concerted attempt to create a quality improvement maturity model (QIMM) derived from holistic principles underlying the successful implementation of system-wide QI programmes.

A hybrid methodology involving a systematic review (Phase 1) of over 270 empirical research articles and books developed the basis for the proposed QIMM. It was followed by expert interviews to refine the core constructs and ground the proposed QIMM in contemporary QI practice (Phase 2). The experts included academics in two academic conferences and 59 QI managers from the New Zealand health-care system. In-depth interviews were conducted with QI managers to ascertain their views on the QIMM and its applicability in their respective health organisations (HOs).

The QIMM consists of four dimensions of organisational maturity, namely, strategic, process, supply chain and philosophical maturity. These dimensions progress through six stages, namely, identification, ad-hoc, formal, process-driven, optimised enterprise and finally a way of life. The application of the QIMM by the QI managers revealed that the scope of QI and the breadth of the principles adopted by the QI managers and their HOs in New Zealand is limited.

The importance of QI in health systems cannot be overstated. The proposed QIMM can help HOs diagnose their current state and provide a guide to action achieving a desirable state of quality improvement maturity. This QIMM avoids reliance on any single QI methodology. HOs – using the QIMM – should retain full control over the process of selecting any QI methodology or may even cherry-pick principles to suit their needs as long as they understand and appreciate the true nature and scope of quality overstated. The proposed QIMM can help HOs diagnose their current state and provide a guide to action achieving a desirable state of quality improvement maturity. This QIMM avoids reliance on any single QI methodology. HOs – using the QIMM – should retain full control over the process of selecting any QI methodology or may even cherry-pick principles to suit their needs as long as they understand and appreciate the true nature and scope of quality.

This paper contributes new knowledge by presenting a maturity model with an integrated set of quality principles for HOs and their extended supply networks.

The purpose of this article is to discuss how the mastery of resilience in operations and supply chains plays a significant role in the transition to a more sustainable future. Furthermore, it is supposed to propose avenues for future research on operational and supply chain resilience, interacting with the sustainability literature in our field.

A conceptual review of resilience and sustainability themes within operations and supply chain management research is conducted. Reflections on the topic are informed by relevant literature published over the last decade.

The major conceptual contributions are threefold: (1) This article elaborates on the understanding of operational resilience and supply chain resilience concepts and reviews their respective primary research streams. (2) It proposes resilience as the missing element in the pursuit of excellence in organizations that want to contribute to a more sustainable future. (3) The article offers a research framework that provides a future research agenda at the intersection of resilience and sustainability in operations and supply chain management research.

The article highlights gaps in current research and illustrates further areas of research that need to be addressed to maximize the contribution of operations and supply chain management research in supporting practitioners to achieve a more sustainable future.

Climate change requires the reduction of direct and indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, a task that seems to clash with increasing supply chain complexity. This study aims to analyse the upstream supply chain complexity dimensions suggesting the importance of understanding the information processing that these may entail. Reducing equivocality can be an issue in some dimensions, requiring the introduction of written guidelines to moderate the effects of supply chain complexity dimensions on GHG emissions at the firm and supply chain level.

A three-year panel data was built with information obtained from Bloomberg, Trucost and Compustat. Hypotheses were tested using random effect regressions with robust standard errors on a sample of 394 SP500 companies, addressing endogeneity through the control function approach.

Horizontal complexity reduces GHG emissions at the firm level, whereas vertical and spatial complexity dimensions increase GHG emissions at the firm and supply chain level. Although the introduction of written guidelines neutralises the negative effects of vertical complexity on firm and supply chain GHG emissions, it is not sufficient in the presence of spatial complexity.

This paper offers novel insights by suggesting that managers need to reconcile the potential trade-off effects on GHG emissions that horizontally complex supply chain structures can present. Their priority in vertically and spatially complex supply chain structures should be to reduce equivocality.

This research aims to analyse the perceptions of practitioners in three regions regarding the challenges faced by their firms during the pandemic, considered a black-swan event. It examines the strategies implemented to mitigate and recover from risks, evaluates the effectiveness of these strategies and assesses the difficulties encountered in their implementation.

In the summer of 2022, an online survey was conducted among supply chain (SC) practitioners in France, Poland and the St. Louis, Missouri region of the USA. The survey aimed to understand the impact of COVID-19 on their firms and the SC strategies employed to sustain operations. These regions were selected due to their varying levels of SC development, including infrastructure, economic resources and expertise. Moreover, they exhibited different responses in safeguarding the well-being of their citizens during the pandemic.

The study reveals consistent perceptions among practitioners from the three regions regarding the impact of COVID-19 on SCs. Their actions to enhance SC resilience primarily relied on strengthening collaborative efforts within their firms and SCs, thus validating the tenets of the relational view.

COVID-19 is (hopefully) our black-swan pandemic occurrence during our lifetime. Nevertheless, the lessons learned from it can inform future SC risk management practices, particularly in dealing with rare crises. During times of crisis, leveraging existing SC structures may prove more effective and efficient than developing new ones. These findings underscore the significance of relationships in ensuring SC resilience.

Digital transformation misalignment refers to disparities in digital transformation levels between suppliers and buyers across the production and operation process. It has negatively affected supply chain stability. However, the existing research concerning the economic consequences has not been adequately addressed. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate whether such digital transformation misalignment increases supplier financial risk and to identify the factors influencing this relationship.

This paper examines binary combinations of suppliers and buyers listed on China’s A-share market between 2011 and 2021. This group constitutes a sample to empirically test the influence of digital transformation misalignment on the supplier’s financial risk, as well as the moderating effect of the geographical and organizational distances.

The paper’s findings demonstrate that digital transformation misalignment has indeed a significant increase in the supplier’s financial risk. Moreover, the impact is more intense when the geographical or organizational distance between the supplier and the buyer is relatively large.

The existing literature rarely explores the potential risks arising from digital transformation misalignment between supply chain partners. Therefore, this paper fills a notable gap as it is the first to study the impact of digital transformation misalignment on the supplier’s financial risk and the specific applied mechanisms. The contribution significantly improves the field of corporate digital transformation, particularly, within the context of supply chain management.

We conducted a systematic review to explore the potential for the application of blockchain technologies for supply chain resilience in a small-scale agri-food business context.

As part of the research methodology, scientific databases such as Web of Science, Google Scholar and Scopus were used to find relevant articles for this review.

The systematic review of articles (n = 57) found that the use of blockchain technology in the small-scale agri-food business sector can reduce the risk of food fraud by assuring the provenance of food products.

Only a few papers were directly from a small-scale agribusiness context. Key challenges that limit the implementation of blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies include concerns over the disclosure of proprietary information and trade secrets, incomplete or inaccurate information, economic and technical difficulties, low levels of trust in the technology, risk of human error and poor governance of process-related issues.

The application of blockchain technology ensures that the risks and costs associated with non-compliance, product recalls and product loss are reduced. Improved communication and information sharing can increase resilience and better support provenance claims and traceability. Better customer relationships can be built, increasing supply chain efficiency and resilience.