Disruptions are a fact of life not only since the Supply Chain literature gained awareness of it. So some institutions in fact specialized on handling disruptions as their core competency.
The article “Responding to Disruptions in the Supply Network – from Dormant to Action” tries to transfer the knowledge and best practices present at the military and humanitarian organizations to Supply Chain Management.
In his 2009 paper Brian Tomlin analyzes strategies to mitigate disruption risks in a three echelon supply chain.
Setting
Focus in his research is a single company, with its suppliers and customers. The objective is to maximize expected utility, while demand and supply are uncertain. There are two products available which can be used as substitutes. The time horizon for the decision maker is one season where the products can be sold.
Mitigation strategies for supply chain risks have have been discussed in the literature for a long time now. Khan and Burnes (2007) mention several strategies like:
Multiple sources of supply vs single sourcing
Buffers
Risk sharing/knowledge transfer
Proactive supply management
But it seems difficult to assign a value and maximum cost for these strategies. Xu and Nizick (2009) are filling this gap.
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.
Supply Chain Risk manifests itself in many ways. Today the German airlines restored their regular flight schedule again after six days of no or limited air traffic, after the latest eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull vulcano on Iceland.
The consequences of such events only rarely become evident, but in the background emergency plans have to be executed (or developed).
