Today we have a look at current research regarding the improvement of resilience within a supply chain.
In their 2012 paper “Supply chain redesign for resilience using simulation” Carvalho et al. analyze supply chain resilience on the basis off a Portuguese automotive parts manufacturer.
One basic assumption in risk-aware supply chain design is the notion that the design of the supply chain actually has an impact on the vulnerability of the supply chain.
This question has been analyzed about six years ago in a broad empirical study by Wagner and Bode.
Efficiency is about trade-offs. Effectiveness is about achieving a goal, making it happen no matter what.
But in reality resources are scarce and efficiently reaching a goal is nearly as important as reaching it at all.
Supply chain design and optimization has been covered in this blog to a great extend. The concept of design implicitly assumes that there is at least one designer, who decides how the desired “optimal” supply chain design should look like.
Defining a supply chain as a group of legally independent companies, shows that the complexity in this decision process might be drastically increased, since one has to include multiple players and their goals in the process.
The quantification of supply chain planning is the next step in the field of supply chain optimization. After operational and logistical aspects have been modeled and optimized, margins for further improvement remain slim.
Based on this premise the paper I review today suggests and tests several alternative multilevel planning approaches to gain further supply chain improvements by optimizing the mid-term supply chain design.
This week is dedicated to the works on supply chain management from Greek supply chain researchers. Today’s article has been published in the Journal of Management Sciences (Omega) by four researchers from northern Greece and the UK.
This article considers the design of robust supply chains from the viewpoint of exception handling. Disruptions of the supply chain happen all the time. Smaller disruptions like quality issues are part of the daily business; but a look at the recent ten years shows that large disruptions, happen more often as well (think of terrorist attacks or earthquakes). “Thus, exception management is an important issue in global supply chain networks.”
This review is about a preprint article which already has been accepted for publication by the “European Journal of Operational Research”. But since there is only a limited space for articles in each issue of the journal, final publication of the article is delayed.
This again is an old classic in supply chain risk literature. In 1997 Marshall L. Fisher published this article in the Harvard Business Review targeting a simple question: “What is the Right Supply Chain for Your Product?”
It is noteworthy that this appears to be one of the most often cited papers in supply chain management. So I overlook the fact that it is quite weak on the methodological foundations.
