Building supply chain resilience in the era of COVID-19: An AHP-DEMATEL approach

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic is the worst humanitarian crisis that economies across the globe have witnessed. Forced lockdowns, social distancing, and restricted mobility have contributed to large scale disruptions in the supply chain network. The purpose of the paper is to identify critical factors affecting global supply chain and evaluate strategies for risk reduction in the supply chain network by making it resilient. Our study incorporates multi-criteria decision approach using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) to analyze factors that affected the supply chain networks with the onset of COVID-19. The AHP method enabled to hierarchically rank the factors based on the relative weightage while DEMATEL ascertained the inter-relationships among the factors and classified them into cause and effect groups. The findings of our study identified the cost–optimization as the most significant factor and the human resource management as the least important factor in reducing vulnerabilities of the supply chain network. Our analysis from DEMATEL approach indicate that government support is a significant causal factor which can effectively eliminate the issues plaguing supply chains during this pandemic. The results from our study aim to help policymakers in developing a risk resilient framework that can enhance performance and operational capability of the supply chain, thereby ensuring sustainability and socio-economic well-being of all the stakeholders involved in the entire network.