Enhancing the Resilience of Sustainable Supplier Management through Combination with Lean and Audit

Abstract

Industry 4.0 has positive effect on the enhancing of the resilience. However, if the resilience can be promoted by lean and auditing environment priority, after further combine with industry 4.0 environment, the resilience will become stronger. Even though, two research questions should be verified priority: How do manufacturers make good use of pull production and employee involvement under lean practices that can strengthen supplier management robustness and enhance the prevention ability of resilience? Why does the combination of lean practices with an audit mechanism strengthen the produce synergy to prevent and control opportunistic behaviour by suppliers? PLS and the Sobel test were applied to survey data from 231 Chinese manufacturers to test and verify research questions. Pull production and employee involvement can enhance responsible purchasing, emergency-response, manufacturing process coupling, and further strengthen supplier management robustness, further enhance the prevention ability of resilience in dealing with opportunistic behaviour. In addition, enhancing manufacturing process coupling has the indirect effect of strengthening emergency-response ability. The audit mechanism can control the dysfunctional behaviour of the supplier, further guiding cooperation with the practice of pull production and employee involvement; in addition, audits also trigger the supplier’s trade-off mindset in terms of risk and profit maintenance.