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This paper examines how firms of different sizes formulate and implement strategies to achieve fit with an external environment disrupted by a geopolitical event. The context of the study is the pharmaceutical industry and how it managed the supply chain uncertainty created by the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union, or Brexit.

Data were collected longitudinally from the pro-Brexit vote on 23 June 2016, until the UK’s departure from the EU on 31 January 2020. Twenty-seven interviews were conducted in the pharmaceutical sector, including nineteen interviews with senior managers at eight case companies and eight interviews with experts working for trade associations and standards institutes. The interview findings were triangulated with Brexit policy and strategy documentation.

When formulating strategy, multi-national enterprises (MNEs) used worst case assumptions, while large firms, and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) gathered knowledge as part of a “wait-and-see” strategy, allowing them to reduce perceptions of heightened supply chain uncertainty. Firms then implemented reactive and/or proactive strategies to mitigate supply chain risks.

The study elaborates on strategic contingency theory by identifying two important conditions for achieving strategic fit: first, companies deploy intangible resources, such as management time, to gather information and reduce perceptions of heightened supply chain uncertainty. Second, companies deploy tangible resources (supply chain redundancies, new supply chain assets) to lessen the negative outcomes of supply chain risks. Managers are provided with an empirical framework for mitigating supply chain uncertainty and risk originating from geopolitical disruptions.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

This research paper concentrates on how companies can strategically prepare for supply chain disruptions caused by geopolitical events like Brexit. The participating pharmaceutical companies of various sizes did not strictly follow one strategy in isolation, but instead followed multiple strategies concurrently and moved fluidly between them. Crucially, managers should be aware of the value of basing contingency plans on worst-case scenarios, since this provides a structure on which to base their plans and reduce their perception of supply chain risk.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Using the constructal law of physics this study aims to provide guidance to future scholarship on global supply chain management. Further, through two case studies the authors are developing, the authors report interview findings with two senior VPs from two multi-national corporations being disrupted by COVID-19. This study suggests how this and recent events will impact on the design of future global supply chains.

The authors apply the constructal law to explain the recent disruptions to the global supply chain orthodoxy. Two interviews are presented from case studies the authors are developing in the USA and UK – one a multi-national automobile parts supplier and the other is a earth-moving equipment manufacture. Specifically, this is an exploratory pathway work trying to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on supply chain scholarship.

Adopting the approach of Bejan, the authors believe that what is happening today with COVID-19 and other trade disruptions such as Brexit and the USA imposing tariffs is creating new obstacles that will redirect the future flow of supply chains.

It is clear that the COVID-19 response introduced a bullwhip effect in the manufacturing sector on a scale never-before seen. For scholars, the authors would suggest there are four pathway topics going forward. These topics include: the future state of global sourcing, the unique nature of a combined “demand” and “supply shortage” bullwhip effect, the resurrection of lean and local production systems and the development of risk-recovery contingency strategies to deal with pandemics.

Supply chain managers tend to be iterative and focused on making small and subtle changes to their current system and way of thinking, very often seeking to optimize cost or negotiate better contracts with suppliers. In the current environment, however, such activities have proved to be of little consequence compared to the massive forces of economic disruption of the past three years. Organizations that have more tightly compressed supply chains are enjoying a significant benefit during the COVID-19 crisis and are no longer being held hostage to governments of another country.

An implicit assumption in the press is that COVID-19 caught everyone by surprise, and that executives foolishly ignored the risks of outsourcing to China and are now paying the price. However, noted scholars and epidemiologists have been warning of the threats of pandemics since the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus. The pundits would further posit that in their pursuit of low-cost production, global corporations made naive assumptions that nothing could disrupt them. Both the firms the authors have interviewed had to close plants to protect their workforce. It was indicated in the cases the authors are developing that it is going to take manufacturers on average one month to recover from 4–6 days of disruption. These companies employ many thousands of people, and direct and ancillary workers are now temporarily laid off and face an uncertain future as/when they will recover back to normal production.

Using the constructal law of physics, the authors seek to provide guidance to future scholarship on global supply chain management. Further, through two case studies, the authors provide the first insight from two senior VPs from two leading multi-national corporations in their respective sectors being disrupted by COVID-19. This study is the first indication to how this and recent disruptive events will impact on the design of future global supply chains. Unlike the generic work, which has recently appeared in HBR and Forbes, it is grounded in real operational insight.

Why do managers redesign global supply chains in a particular manner when faced with compounding geopolitical disruptions? In answering this research question, this study identifies a constrained system of reasoning (decision-making logic) employed by managers when they redesign their supply chains in situations of heightened uncertainty.

The authors conducted 40 elite interviews with senior supply chain executives in 28 companies across nine industries from November 2019 to June 2020, when the UK was preparing to leave the European Union, the US–China trade war was escalating, and Covid-19 was spreading rapidly around the globe.

When redesigning global supply chains, the authors find that managerial decision-making logic is constrained by three distinct environmental ecosystem conditions: (1) the perceived intensity of institutional pressures; (2) the relative mobility of suppliers and supply chain assets; and (3) the perceived severity of the potential disruption risk. Intense government pressure and persistent geopolitical risk tend to impact firms in the same industry, resulting in similar approaches to decision-making regarding supply chain design. However, where suppliers are relatively immobile and supply chain assets are relatively fixed, a dominant logic is consistently present.

Building on an institutional logics perspective, this study finds that managerial decision-making under heightened uncertainty is not solely guided by institutional pressures but also by perceptions of the severity of risk related to potential supply chain disruption and the immobility of supply chain assets. These findings support the theoretical development of a novel construct that the authors term ‘supply chain logics’. Finally, this study provides a decision-making framework for Senior Executives competing in an increasingly complex and unstable business environment.

This study investigates the impact of geopolitical disruptions on the manufacturing supply chain (SC) location decision of managers in UK multinational firms. The context of study is the UK manufacturing sector and its response to the UK's decision to leave the European Union (EU), or Brexit.

The study adopts an abductive, theory elaboration approach and expands on Dunning's eclectic paradigm of international production. A Delphi study over four iterative rounds is conducted to gather and assess insights into manufacturing SC location issues related to Brexit. The panel consisted of 30 experts and managers from a range of key industries, consultancies, governmental organisations, and academia. The Delphi findings are triangulated using a focus group with 38 participants.

The findings indicate that the majority of companies planned or have relocated production facilities from the UK to the EU, and distribution centres (DCs) from the EU to the UK. This was because of market-seeking advantages (being close to major centres of demand, ease of access to local and international markets) and efficiency-seeking advantages (costs related to expected delays at ports, tariff and non-tariff barriers). Ownership and internalisation advantages, also suggested by the eclectic paradigm, did not play a role in the location decision.

The study elaborates on the OLI framework by showing that policy-related uncertainty is a primary influencing factor in the manufacturing location decision, outweighing the importance of uncertainty as an influencer of governance mode choices. The authors find that during geopolitical disruptions managers make location decisions in tight time-frames with incomplete and imperfect information, in situations of high perceived uncertainty. The study elaborates on the eclectic paradigm by explaining how managerial cognition and bounded rationality influence the manufacturing location decision-making process.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the role of operations management in society. The article detects trends, raises critical questions to operations management research and articulates a research agenda to increase the value of such research in addressing societal problems.

This paper evaluates the papers presented at the EurOMA 2019 conference to detect trends and discuss the contributions of operations management research to society. It further goes to identify gaps in the research agenda.

The article finds several important streams of research in operations management: sustainable operations and supply chains, health care and humanitarian operations, innovation, digitalisation and 4.0, risk and resilience. It highlights new trends such as circular economy research and problematises when to stop implementing innovation and how to address and report their potential failure. Importantly, it shows how it is not just a question of offshoring vs reshoring but of constant change in manufacturing that operations management addresses.

The article highlights not just novel research areas but also gaps in the research agenda where operations management seeks to add value to society.

This paper examines nationalism as a driver of political risk and how it can lead to supply chain disruptions for foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs).

Conceptual research based on a review of the literature on nationalism and supply chain risk management.

This research unveils how economic nationalism could engender supply chain disruptions via discriminatory practices toward all foreign MNEs and how national animosity may generate additional risks for the MNEs of nations in conflict with one another. These discriminatory practices include an array of host government and grassroots actions targeting foreign MNEs. While economic nationalism and national animosity emanate from within a host country, they may stimulate geopolitical crises outside the host country and thereby affect the international supply chains of foreign MNEs.

This research lays the foundation for analytical and empirical researchers to integrate key elements of nationalism into their studies and recommends propositions and datasets to study these notions.

This study shows the implications that nationalist drivers of supply chain disruptions have for foreign MNEs and thus can help managers to proactively mitigate such disruptions.

This study reveals the importance of integrating notions of national identity and national history in supply chain research, since they play a key role in the emergence of policies and events responsible for supply chain disruptions.

Inventory management systems in health-care supply chains (HCSC) have been pushed to breaking point by the COVID-19 pandemic. Unanticipated demand shocks due to stockpiling of medical supplies caused stockouts, and the stockouts triggered systematic supply chain (SC) disruptions inconceivable for risk managers working individually with limited information about the pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to respond to calls from the United Nations (UN) and World Health Organization (WHO) for coordinated global action by proposing a research agenda based on a review of current knowledge and knowledge gaps on the role of collaboration in HCSCs in maintaining optimal stock levels and reinforcing resilience against stockout disruptions during pandemics.

A systematic review was conducted, and a total of 752 articles were analyzed.

Collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment practices are under-researched in the HCSC literature. Similarly, a fragmented application of extant SC collaborative risk management capabilities undermines efforts to enhance resilience against systematic disruptions from medical stockouts. The paucity of HCSC articles in humanitarian logistics and SC journals indicates a need for more research interlinking two interdependent yet critical fields in responding to pandemics.

Although based on an exhaustive search of academic articles addressing HCSCs, there is a possibility of having overlooked other studies due to search variations in language controls, differences in publication cycle time and database search engines.

The paper relies on COVID-19's uniqueness to highlight the limitations in optimization and individualistic approaches to managing medical inventory and stockout risks in HCSCs. The paper proposes a shift from a fragmented to holistic application of relevant collaboration practices and capabilities to enhance the resilience of HCSCs against stockout ripple effects during future pandemics. The study propositions and suggestion for an SC learning curve provide an interdisciplinary research agenda to trigger early preparation of a coordinated HCSC and humanitarian logistics response to future pandemics.

This “impact pathways” paper argues that operations and supply chain management (OSCM) could help address the worsening drug shortage problem in high-income countries. This significant societal problem poses difficult challenges to stakeholders given the complex and dynamic nature of drug supply chains. OSCM scholars are well positioned to provide answers, introducing new research directions for OSCM in the process.

To substantiate this, the authors carried out a review of stakeholder reports from six European countries and the academic literature.

There is little academic research and no fundamental agreement among stakeholders about causes of shortages. Stakeholders have suggested many government measures, but little evidence exists on their comparative cost-effectiveness.

The authors discuss three pathways of impactful research on drug shortages to which OSCM could contribute: (1) Developing an evidence-based system view of drug shortages; (2) Studying the comparative cost-effectiveness of key government interventions; (3) Bringing supply chain risk management into the government and economics perspectives and vice versa. Our study provides a baseline for future COVID-19-related research on this topic.

This paper investigates how companies become resilient to supply chain (SC) piracy through using transactional and relational governance mechanisms to develop strategies effective in environments characterized by weak regulative institutions and mistrust.

This study developed case studies of nine large manufacturers with operations in Brazil.

The companies employed transactional and relational governance mechanisms to learn from past incidents, anticipate, and respond to the threat of SC piracy, becoming more resilient over time. Transactional governance mechanisms reduced risk triggers through technology, while relational governance mechanisms enhanced trust between SC and non-SC members, allowing the members to build social capital.

The authors provide practical guidance for managers and policymakers in developing risk management strategies based on technology and collaboration to reduce SC piracy in environments characterized by mistrust.

SC piracy is a serious problem for global operations and SCs in many low-cost manufacturing locations. Besides the cost and service level consequences, the authors also highlight worker safety consequences, including the potential for kidnapping, psychological trauma, injuries, and death.

This study focuses on the little-researched topic of SC piracy. The authors examine the negative effects of a weak institutional environment, while most prior research focuses on the positive effects of a strong institutional environment. The authors position transactional and relational governance mechanisms as essential elements of SC risk resilience.