Promoting resilience in medicine supply chains: An exploration of the role of contracting

Research on supply chain resilience identifies strategies and underlying capabilities for responding to disruptions, including sourcing strategies. However, we still know little about how contracting decisions, specifically, influence resilience. We explore the role of contracting through a qualitive case study of medicine procurement in the English National Health Service. We find that tendering and contracting practices tend to promote resilience based on redundancy, rather than on adaptive capabilities to cope with unforeseen disruptions. We extend prior research by positioning contracting interventions into the emerging discourse over the engineering and ecological perspectives on supply chain resilience.