The Viable Supply Chain: Designing for Adaptability, Purpose, and Sustained Business Value

This book is about supply chain viability. A viable supply chain possesses the requisite variety and feedback mechanisms to adapt and respond to multiple future scenarios without knowing them in advance, ensuring both performance and the persistence of purpose. Viability views supply chains more as living organisms and less as engineered mechanisms. This expands the purpose of the supply chain from an operational asset focused on cost efficiency to a strategic integrator of business, society, and ecosystems of regenerative value creation. The book examines fundamental questions about how resilience and viability can be designed into supply chains.

To address these questions, the book takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on supply chain management, industrial engineering, cybernetics and control, systems science, and biology. It offers a rich combination of foundational knowledge, practical frameworks, implementation guidelines, and philosophical reflections. At its heart, the book is about increasing business value through adaptability and equipping supply chains and ultimately society with the capabilities needed to survive and thrive in deep uncertainty. This book is not about perfection; it is about purpose. If you find missing connections or structures, feel free to create them, because life is not about rigid frameworks but about meaningful adaptation. This is a book about us.

Dr. Dmitry Ivanov is Professor of supply chain and operations management at Berlin School of Economics and Law (HWR Berlin), Germany. His publication list includes around 500 publications, including more than 200 papers in international academic journals and a leading textbook Global Supply Chain and Operations Management. His main research interests and results span the supply chain resilience and viability, digital twins, simulation, and AI. He is actively involved with editorial work in leading international journals.