Lean and Resilience in Post-Crisis Supply Chains: Rethinking Just-in-Time and Redundancy. A Structured Literature

Over the past decades, many supply chains have evolved in line with Lean Management principles—reducing inventories, synchronizing flows, shortening lead times, and pursuing efficiency through practices such as Just-in-Time (JIT), pull systems, and closer supplier integration. However, recent systemic disruptions (global supply interruptions, extreme demand volatility, logistics breakdowns, and energy shocks) have shown that efficiency-driven optimization can also create vulnerabilities, especially in environments characterized by high uncertainty and discontinuity. In parallel, the Supply Chain Resilience literature has consolidated a set of concepts and capabilities—robustness, redundancy, flexibility, agility, visibility, and recovery metrics such as time-to-recover and time-to-survive. This has revived an important but still unresolved debate: to what extent is the Lean paradigm—particularly JIT—compatible with resilience? Some studies emphasize a trade-off (fewer buffers leading to greater fragility), while others argue that Lean can strengthen resilience by stabilizing processes and developing routines for rapid problem solving and organizational learning. Current knowledge remains fragmented across multiple domains (Operations Management, Supply Chain Management, Risk Management, and Industrial Engineering), with inconsistent definitions and heterogeneous findings. A rigorous and replicable synthesis is therefore needed to clarify the state of the art and to develop a framework that supports both theory building and managerial decision-making for designing “lean-resilient” supply chains.