Along with the Sino-U.S. trade dispute , the complex geopolitical situation and other variable factors, supply chain friction has become the norm. The risks associated with the flow of capital, information, and logistics in the supply chain have dramatically increased, making it urgent to improve the chain's resilience in order to mitigate disruption risk and maintain the chain's security and stability. At this stage, the importance of data elements in empowering supply chain governance is becoming more and more prominent, and the scale of data assets owned and the ability to transform them into productivity have become important factors in gaining new competitive advantages. From the perspective of supply chain network characteristics, the penetration and application of data elements in the subject and structural elements of the supply chain have significantly revolutionized the operation mode of the supply chain, and become a key driving factor to enhance risk-taking and ensure the continuity of supply and demand.
This study investigates the enabling mechanisms of data elements on the subject and the structural resilience of the supply chain in order to reveal the supply chain resilience enhancement paths in a more thorough and detailed manner. As a result, given the network characteristics of the supply chain, the subject element and structural element may show different resilience mechanisms against risks. By employing the OLS regression model, the study collects data from Chinese listed companies between 2015 and 2022 and uses text analysis to create indicators that show the application level of enterprise data elements. It then uses supply chain subject resilience and structural resilience to characterize the overall resilience of the supply chain and empirically investigates the impact of data elements on resilience.
The research results show that data elements can effectively enhance the level of enterprise risk-taking and the stability of supply-demand relationship, and the findings remain robust after a series of endogeneity and robustness tests, showing that data elements can effectively enhance both supply chain subject resilience and structural resilience. In addition, the application of data elements by enterprises can effectively enhance the innovation effect and the information effect, thus improving the innovation capability of enterprises and obtaining the information advantage to promote the resilience of the supply chain. At the same time, the enabling effect of data elements on supply chain resilience can be differentiated by the internal and external environments of enterprises, that is, the enabling effect is stronger when the enterprise is large, operates in a highly competitive industry, and is situated in an area with a poor supply chain operating environment and high marketization.
Compared with the results of previous studies, this study expands the research perspective of supply chain resilience, constructs enterprise-level supply chain resilience measurement indexes from the perspective of network characteristics, and enriches the research scope of supply chain in the era of digital economy; and it further empirically examines the two indirect empowerment mechanisms of innovation effect and information effect, which provides a useful supplement to the research on the empowerment mechanism of data elements on supply chain resilience. Through the analysis of the research findings, this study proposes to accelerate the construction of data element marketization, further activate the potential of data elements in enhancing supply chain resilience, and formulate targeted data elements application solutions according to the differences in the internal and external environments of enterprises, which will help the government optimize the policies on data elements and supply chain and support the scientific decision-making of enterprises, and have certain theoretical significance for the implementation of the strategic plan of "focusing on enhancing the resilience and security of industrial chain and supply chain".
Future research may integrate the two dimensions of supply chain entity resilience and relationship resilience into a comprehensive index for research, further combine the characteristics of the supply chain to reveal the mechanism path involving more data elements to empower supply chain resilience improvement, and the subsequent economic impacts of data elements empowering supply chain resilience improvement could be predicted.