Global Journal of Management and Business Research, A: Administration and Management, Volume 22 Issue 7

understood as a chain of value-added activities within an organisation, where value is continuously added to the product (Porter, 1985). However, holistically, a value chain of a company also plays a significant role in a larger stream of activities of multiple value chains, which is known as the value system. Essentially, by providing the inputs necessary to produce and deliver the product to the final customer, the value system consists of the value chains of the suppliers as well as the customers (Bozarth & Handfield, 2015). For this reason, the value chain becomes interrelated to the supply chain, as a supply chain is characterised as a network of organisations that are involved to realise a product, which in this paper will be recognised as interchangeable with a value system (Mentzer, et al., 2001). II. U nforeseen E vents: M itigation of S upply C hain D isruption Throughout the last three years, value chains have been immensely affected worldwide by the occurrences of, for example, COVID-19 and the Suez Canal blockage. The events have entailed broken supply chains in various industries, which have further led to a realisation of one’s vulnerability when it comes to responding to buyer demand in uncertain times (Thalbauer, 2020; Elenjickal, 2021). Therefore, this section will explore what organisations have learnt from these unforeseen events, and further investigate how the occurrences have left a footprint in the organisations’ ways of mitigating risk in global supply chains moving forward. a) COVID-19 Across the last years, the pandemic, known as COVID-19, has instigated a chaotic presence for organisations worldwide, as the phenomenon has caused an awareness of how exposed global corporations’ supply chains have been to uncertainty (Ivanov & Dolgui, 2020). According to Thalbauer (2020), the result of the chaotic presence is that: “[supply chains] are broken and [organisations] need to evolve to a new normal”. Essentially, the offering of logistics services for one’s products, such as same-day-delivery, has become more challenging because of the lack of visibility, collaboration, and coordination with one’s supply chain partners. As stated by Swanson and Yoshinori (2020), the supply chain has been impacted tremendously by the pandemic, logistically influencing corporations’ transportations capacity, supply channels, inventories, and responsiveness. Overall, COVID-19 has had a vast impact on nearly every industry. As a result, the prediction is that it will affect the supply capabilities and value generation of a product for years to come (Lawrence, 2020; Shih, 2020). Henceforward, it can be argued that succeeding supply chains will be the ones that acknowledge and enable uncertainty to appear in the organisational journey as a part of the ‘new normal’. Moreover, as the pandemic is expected to affect supply chains moving forward, global organisations should interpret this current period of time as a call for action. This implies ensuring that the supply chain’s value generation is robust to mitigate its exposure to unforeseen risk (Shih, 2020). Such risk could entail a threat to stakeholders’ value interest in the individual organisation and further negatively impact the corporations’ outwardly reliability, thus, harming one’s competitive standing (Mentzer, et al., 2007). Therefore, there is a rising competitive need to enhance one’s resilience to cope with supply chain volatility (Elenjickal, 2021). It has been found that one approach to initially enhance an organisation’s level of resilience could be through a more transparent elegance of communication, both in internal and external processes (Lee, et al., 1997; Schvaneveldt & Neve, 2021). b) Suez Canal Blockage In the midst of COVID-19, another unprecedented event blocked and disrupted the world’s supply chains, when a large Ever Green containership was stuck for six days in the Suez Canal during March 2021 (Elenjickal, 2021). The blockage resonated with ripple effects, which entailed a delay in manufacturing processes across industries (Brooks, et al., 2021). Similarly with the pandemic, the Suez Canal blockage has been regarded as a call for action, which is why organisations ought to scrutinise how they could optimise supply chain flows in order to mitigate exposure to supply instability (Xie & Chiu, 2021). As argued by Chopra and Sodhi (2004), since supply chain risks have a linkage to unpredicted events that disrupt the chain by delaying the information flow, corporations are urged to implement an extent of preparedness and agility with a resilience strategy. Consequently, one could therefore also say that organisations’ current state of unpreparedness is a consequence of the last decades’ desire of becoming lean through elimination of non-value adding processes, which potentially have mitigated room for resilience plans if unprecedented circumstances would occur (Modig & Åhlström, 2018). Ultimately, the unforeseen events have left a noticeable footprint upon how organisations and their collaborating supply chain partners ought to cope with uncertainty moving forward. At the same time, the two described disturbances have entailed a long list of lessons learned for corporations to become more resilient. According to Elenjickal (2021): “uncertainties happen. And they seem to be happening with greater frequency”. In other words, one of the greatest learning outcomes has unarguably been that, from now on, supply chain volatility will be an essential practice to manage, as one cannot prevent disruptions from occurring. 2 Global Journal of Management and Business Research Volume XXII Issue VII Version I Year 2022 ( ) A © 2022 Global Journals Time for Revitalisation of Value Chain Management: A Reassessment of Porter’s View on Procurement