Enabling

Marketing

Industry 4.0

Embedded system

Supply chain risk management

Computer science

Risk analysis (engineering)

Business

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Systematic review

Thermodynamics

Physics

Process management

Psychology

Supply chain management

Political science

Psychotherapist

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Supply chain

MEDLINE

Medicine

Service management

Resilience (materials science)

Knowledge management

Pandemic

Disease

Pathology

Computers & Industrial Engineering

The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most severe supply chain disruptions in history and has challenged practitioners and scholars to improve the resilience of supply chains. Recent technological progress, especially industry 4.0, indicates promising possibilities to mitigate supply chain risks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive analysis of the link between industry 4.0 and supply chain resilience. To close this research gap, we present evidence from a systematic literature review, including 62 papers from high-quality journals. Based on a categorization of industry 4.0 enabler technologies and supply chain resilience antecedents, we introduce a holistic framework depicting the relationship between both areas while exploring the current state-of-the-art. To verify industry 4.0’s resilience opportunities in a severe supply chain disruption, we apply our framework to a use case, the COVID-19-affected automotive industry. Overall, our results reveal that big data analytics is particularly suitable for improving supply chain resilience, while other industry 4.0 enabler technologies, including additive manufacturing and cyber-physical systems, still lack proof of effectiveness. Moreover, we demonstrate that visibility and velocity are the resilience antecedents that benefit most from industry 4.0 implementation. We also establish that industry 4.0 holistically supports pre-disruption resilience measures, enabling more effective proactive risk management. Both research and practice can benefit from this study. While scholars may analyze resilience potentials of under-explored enabler technologies, practitioners can use our findings to guide industry 4.0 investment decisions.

Improving supply chain resilience through industry 4.0: A systematic literature review under the impressions of the COVID-19 pandemic