Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and attendant worldwide shocks have highlighted one of the main weaknesses in the way of constructing supply chains globally: the excessive prioritization of efficiency in the processes concerning the work force, instead of focusing on adaptability and resilience. In the past, the business process management (BPM) systems in supply chain primarily focused on just-in-time strategy and lean structures, cutting the cost by slimming down the workforce. Nevertheless, today, with the geopolitical shifts, labor shortage, and the pressure of digital transformation that formed the current post-crisis landscape, organizations have to redefine the meaning of optimization. This paper discusses how the paradigm in workforce optimization strategies has changed (i.e. the paradigm shift of efficiency to resilience) in a global supply chain BPM. It is multidisciplinary in its approach, a fusion of BPM theory, organizational resilience, and the supply chain management, through which it makes examination of how business is re-calibrating its objectives and systems. The study enables practice-oriented ideas on how to align the BPM design with workforce resilience through case analyses, theoretical integration, and a synthesized conceptual framework of the same. The study is relevant to both the theory and practice in that it has discovered new resilience-based workforce metrics, developed BPM models and proposed decision-making frameworks to future-proof supply chains.