Supply Chain Resilience: The Case of Chinese Pig Industry

The focus on lean production in a turbulent business environment and increasing unforeseen adverse events have resulted in a higher likelihood of severe supply chain disruptions. This drives the need for supply chain resilience (SCR) building as means for organizations to achieve business continuity through adapting, responding, and recovering from unexpected risks.
Responding to the call to better understand the mechanism of SCR building and framed by the contextual issues arising from the agricultural supply chain, the overarching purpose of this study is to advance the knowledge in supply chain resilience beyond the traditional risk management and static resilience approach. More specifically, this study explores how organizations make decisions on resource investment and build SCR capabilities during risk recovery and discovered how the supply chain co-evolves with its environment in terms of SCR building through analysing the organization’s resources investment configuration strategies. Building on the conservation of resources theory and ambidexterity theory, a novel resilience-building framework was revealed, and a theory of Resilient Resource Based View (RRBV) was developed.
This thesis presents the empirical findings drawn from multiple case studies within four Chinese leading pig production organisations, focusing on their risk mitigation processes. The result of this study highlights that the stress of resource uncertainty or loss may trigger organizations to engage in different resource management strategies. The organization achieves SCR by investing on different bundles of resources considering three resource factors within their supply chain, the resource Valence (appropriateness), the Resource availability of existing resource caravan and the complementarity of future invested resources toward the existing resources. Subsequently, two resource management strategies, knowledge-based resource management strategy and relationship-based resource management strategy were identified to enable organizations to replenish the loss of resources. During the resource accumulation and acquisition process, organizations focus on either vertical integration and knowledge management capability building or supplier integration to construct highly resilient systems.