Chain-Wide Efficiency in Industrial and Supply Chains: A Review of Definitions, Efficiency–Resilience Linkages, and Measurement Approaches

Existing efficiency assessments differ in scope and do not consistently distinguish local from complete-chain performance. This review combines bibliometric mapping with conceptual and methodological synthesis to clarify chain-wide efficiency in industrial and supply chains. Database searching and screening yielded 621 publications from the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus, with corpus construction documented using an adapted PRISMA 2020 flow diagram. Descriptive statistics and author-keyword co-occurrence analysis reveal publication growth and seven coexisting thematic clusters, with increasing attention to digitalization, resilience, and disruption. Chain-wide efficiency covers the complete process from initial production to final consumption, including all relevant nodes and effective linkages within an explicitly defined assessment boundary. Efficiency–resilience trade-offs or synergies depend on resource use, risk type, node position, network structure and input substitutability. The comparison of four DEA-based approaches—black-box DEA, network DEA, game-theoretic DEA, and CoDEA—shows that they emphasize overall inputs and outputs, interstage linkages, actor decisions, and virtual efficiency transmission, respectively. The representative baseline formulations of these four DEA-based approaches have yet to adequately accommodate interpretable node linkages, dynamic shocks, and interactions among multiple actors within a single framework. Future research should strengthen common-dataset benchmarking and integrate efficiency measurement with shock propagation, member coordination, and network reconfiguration.