Unifying Efforts to Rebound Operational Excellence and Export Competitiveness

COVID-19 pandemic have provided us an opportunity to retrospect, our traditional practices, operations, supply chain functions and their linkages with firm competitiveness. The recovery to the new normal of operational excellence is the challenging task ahead. The critical a question in post-pandemic recovery can be—How can the firms rebound to operational excellence and achieve the benchmarks of international competitiveness with the current uncertainties in both demand and supply sides? Trigger the thinking on the challenging issue, we had invited the scholarly articles, empirical studies, reviews and perspective papers based on the theme “Rebound to Higher Levels of Operational Excellence and Export competitiveness”. This work presents the editorial summary of the special issue and suggest pathways and possible research and managerial, policy level directives towards the Operational Excellence and Export competitiveness. The study utilizes three specific inputs- (a) Academic resources, (b) Industrial Discourse and (c) International trade and Government initiatives to present the directives for further research interventions. While, this multi-perspective consideration does not represent the comprehensive systematic literature review or the empirical research, but it enables us to explore the challenges, enablers and decision-making approaches for rebounding operational excellence towards export competitiveness. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42943-021-00043-7.