Development of a Compass Framework to Achieve an Agile and Sustainable Supply Network

Digital transformation offers significant potential to reshape supply chains; however, implementation efforts remain fragmented, technology-centric, and insufficiently aligned with strategic, organizational, and sustainability goals. Existing frameworks and maturity models tend to emphasize the technological dimension, offering limited guidance on how digital transformation should be integrated with people, processes, culture, and sustainability at the supply network level. Building on evidence synthesized through an umbrella review of the state of the art, this paper proposes the Agile and Sustainable Supply Network Compass, a holistic and actionable framework designed to support organizations in advancing toward agile and sustainable supply networks. The Compass incorporates three structural dimensions—Strategy, Processes, and Capabilities (related to digitalization and sustainability)—as foundational pillars for transformation. We hypothesize that an effective transformation requires the joint alignment of strategy, cross-functional processes, and capabilities, as well as the explicit identification of a reduced supply network, a focal firm, and its critical linkages. The results show that positioning agility and sustainability as shared strategic objectives at the supply network level enables coherent decision-making, targeted capability development and improved coordination across interconnected actors. Rather than prescribing specific technologies, the proposed framework provides a guiding methodological logic that explains how digitalization and sustainability can co-evolve within supply networks. This work contributes to both theory and practice by bridging conceptual gaps in the literature and establishing the groundwork for future maturity models and empirical applications.