Building resilience amidst a crisis: An automaker’s procurement journey to secure semiconductor supply

Journal article, 2026

With procurement as the core function for managing supply, this study investigates how procurement contributes to building supply chain resilience during high-impact and long-lasting disruptions. Drawing on the adaptive cycle perspective of resilience, we investigate how procurement influences potential and connectedness in procurement and supply management (PSM) to support persistence, adaptation, and transformation in response to long-lasting, high-impact disruptions. Using in-depth data from a case of a commercial vehicle original equipment manufacturer, our findings show that procurement not only enables operational continuity through internal coordination and external information flows, but also facilitates strategic adaptation by reconfiguring processes and relationships. Notably, procurement drives the transformation of a firm’s PSM by institutionalizing new roles internally and redefining its role in the supply network. We propose a conceptual framework that links procurement to changes in potential and connectedness and theorizes how procurement contributes to resilience, based on an adaptive view of resilience.