Retail supply chain responsiveness: Towards a retail-specific framework and a future research agenda

The purpose of this paper is to review existing research on retail supply chain responsiveness, develop categories to be included in a retail-specific responsiveness framework, and identify future research areas within the scope of retail supply chain responsiveness.

This paper presents an inductive systematic literature review of 46 academic, peer-reviewed articles. Based around the two major review questions on retailers’ role in the creation of supply chain responsiveness and future research areas, an inductive, qualitative, content analysis was conducted. Further analysis was conducted by using the software NVivo 11.

Existing research are grouped into a framework of four categories that together span the existing research. The categories are labelled supply chain orchestration, market orientation, supply chain operations and supply management. Two to three subthemes in each category are presented. Thereafter, promising future research areas are outlined, covering methodological issues, theoretical underpinnings, inclusion of context variables and outcomes of retail supply chain responsiveness.

The conducted systematic literature review has been limited to academic, peer-reviewed articles.

The findings of the paper constitute a promising initial step towards a retail-specific framework on retail supply chain responsiveness.

The paper questions the comprehensiveness of established models in responsiveness, and argues that existing “general” literature on supply chain responsiveness gives little guidance and structure to retailers’ specific role and involvement in supply chain responsiveness. In particular, the paper focusses on the retailers’ role for creation of supply chain responsiveness, which has not previously been addressed in research.