Guest editorial: Managing maturity of global supply chains: learning from COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

[...]none of these studies has explored maturity in terms of global supply chains and their response capacity amid impacting and unexpected events such as COVID-19. [...]this special issue sought to publish papers that clearly demonstrate the practical and theoretical impacts of maturity in global supply chains in the context of sudden disruptive events such as COVID-19. The second article, which is titled “A systematic review of AR/VR in operations and supply chain management: maturity, current trends and future directions” has brought a relevant contribution to the issue by providing a systematic insight into the current maturity of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) in operations and supply chain management (OSCM), considering the context of COVID-19. The research findings demonstrated that AR/VR are still in the introduction and growth phase and that they have yet to reach their maturity. [...]the study has also shown that there is a limited utilization of AR/VR as drivers in facilitating sustainable practices in OSCM and that the potential applications of these technologies for the recovery phase of supply chains in the post-COVID-19 era require special attention. The five papers on this special issue have approached maturity management by considering the context of the COVID-19 pandemic from different perspectives and making the following contributions: determining the resilience and agility factors that increase the maturity of fast fashion supply chains;establishing how disruptive technologies such as virtual and AR can contribute to developing more resilient and mature supply chains;identifying research and practice gaps in supply chain resilience by connecting this topic with cost-effective and sustainable supply chain themes and showing how these key strategies enhance supply chain maturity and survivability;studying strategies focused on supply chain digitalization and integration for enhancing resilience in MOSCs amid a pandemic situation;and determining the impact of different industrial sectors from the lens of their maturity management to the performance response amid the COVID-19 pandemic.