Adoption of Proactive and Reactive Supply Chain Resilience Strategies: A Comparative Analysis of Apparel and Construction Industries in Sri Lanka

Abstract

With the current uncertain globalized supply chain (SC) networks, business organizations face serious resilience challenges during disruptions. To mitigate the effects of these disruptions, organizations adopt variety of resilience strategies. The degree of adoption of resilience strategies may differ across industries based on variances in the business environments and the characteristics of SCs. Considering the significance of exploring the differences, particularly, in the developing economies that have undergone frequent disruptive events due to economic and political reasons, this study assesses the degree of adoption of three proactive and three reactive SC resilience strategies in Sri Lankan apparel and construction industries. The primary data for this study were gathered using an online survey consisting of multi-itemed questions on the six resilience strategies from 162 apparel and 185 construction companies in Sri Lanka. The findings revealed that a significant difference exists between the two industries in terms of the level of implementation of five resilience strategies, namely, proactive collaboration, digital connectivity, integrated SC risk management, inventory and reserve capacity and lifeline maintenance, while reactive collaboration has no significant difference across the two industries in terms of implementation. Further analysis confirmed that the export-oriented apparel industry led in adopting SC resilience strategies, mainly the reactive strategies compared to the construction sector, which has project-based characteristics in SCs. Improving proactive strategies could be a great initiative to higher resilience performance in both apparel and construction sectors, where implementation could be challenging due to high resource and knowledge requirements of strategies including digital connectivity.