How Big Data Analytics Mitigates Supply Chain Vulnerability? An Interpretive Structural Modeling

The COVID-19 pandemic and trade frictions impact the continuity of supply chain (SC) operations. In the volatile environment, big data analytics (BDA), a key technology for storing data and predictive analytics, has become an important tool for mitigating SC vulnerability. Based on the literature review, this paper identifies six influencing factors and four vulnerability drivers for mitigating vulnerability, and employs Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) and Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to a Classification (MICMAC) to explore the influence pathways that BDA mitigates SC vulnerability. The findings show that BDA can influence knowledge acquisition and strategy formulation by improving the forecasting capability of enterprises, which facilitates strategy implementation and ultimately mitigates vulnerability. Furthermore, with the support of BDA, resource redundancy addresses vulnerability from supply-side, higher production level and efficiency reduce vulnerability from demand-side, and rational SC design alleviates vulnerability from operation-side.