Research Issues for Managing Supply Chain Disruptions

What do professionals in the domain of supply chain management think about disruptions? How do they prepare for them, how do they act when a disruption occurs?

Blackhurst et al. (2005) answer these questions in their work about “An empirically derived agenda of critical research issues for managing supply-chain disruptions”.The authors are using three different empirical methods to achieve this goal empirically: Case study, surveys and focus groups.

Disruptions

As you would expect from a theoretical article they start with the question: What are disruptions anyway? They can show themselves in different forms: eg. transportation delays, natural disasters, part shortages, quality issues. The common theme is, that disruptions are costly and can trigger stock-outs, which leads to the inability to meet customer needs.

Other authors like Hendricks and Singhal (2003) show that supply chain disruptions can cause huge cost.

And disruptions are on the rise due to global sourcing, which increases the potential for disruptions and the movement towards increased responsiveness, higher levels of agility and lower inventories.

Results

The empirical study results in the following three steps to master supply chain disruptions.

• Disruption discovery
  Visibility and predictive analysis are most important to discover disruptions, the update of risk measures therefore has to be more dynamic (up to real-time) to be useable.
• Disruption recovery
  Recovery starts with damage control, it should be build on a model to understand hwo disruptions will affect the supply chain
• Supply chain redesign
  The goal for redesign is to include all relevant (hidden?) costs of a global supply chain and to aim for a flexible and robust supply chain optimization

Conclusion

The article builds a framework to think about disruptions within a supply chain. As the title already suggests this article only points at the issues researchers are/should be working at the moment. And there is still a lot of work to do.