Supply Chain Management (SCM) cannot distance itself from seeking both sustainability and resilience to deal with consecutive change. To achieve this objective, SCM has seen the adoption of digital technologies as a decisive tool to face challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. These disruptions guide SC managers to search for new opportunities and strategies that impact them in the short and long term.

The terms “supply chain sustainability” and “supply chain resilience” have been well explored in literature as independent terms, but there is a lack of studies on their combination, especially in the digital field. This paper aims to explore the extant literature focused on the adoption of digital technologies that contribute to the development of sustainable and resilient SCs, recurring to a systematic literature review. The objective is to identify the trade-offs and the synergies that characterize the relationship between technological-enabled practices for sustainability and resilience.

The database used was Scopus and the formulated query resulted from de author’s discussion including words related to supply chain, sustainability, resilience, and digital technologies. Only articles published in journals and in English were considered, and there was no restriction regarding the date of publication.

The first search presented a total of 136 articles (March 2023). The selection was performed in two stages: (1) reading the abstracts and keywords of all papers; (2) full reading of the papers selected in the first stage. After the first analysis (step 1), we selected 63 articles. After step 2, 42 papers that address the relationship between digital technologies and sustainability and resilience were kept.

The results showed an increase in the production of papers approaching the themes, possibly (at least in part) due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the pressure that competition provokes on the stakeholders.

The technologies majorly identified are related to Blockchain, Additive Manufacturing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things as means to achieve SCs with higher levels of resilience and sustainability, being also identified papers that approach the terms “industry 4.0” and “industry 5.0”. The main fields where papers have been conducted are food supply chain, agriculture, and automotive industries because of the traceability capabilities of most technologies. These findings lead to the conclusion that these technologies are the ones with the potential to change organizations and research is focusing on the initial links of SC.

According to the quantitative analysis, 2022 was the year when more articles were published in the journals Operations Management Research, Annals of Operations Research, and Production Planning and Control as the ones that published more. Most papers focused on the utilization of one technology and do not identify a specific theory. We conclude that there is crescent interest in this topic and a lack of theoretical support.

This study contributes to increasing the body of knowledge related to digital technologies in SCs that simultaneously contributes to achieving resilience and sustainability in those SCs. The findings resulting from this systematic literature review help consolidate the theme for future research.

Ricardo Zimmermann

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The role of digital technologies in the development of resilient and sustainable supply chains