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.
Perhaps this research by Pero et al. can support small and medium sized companies with the design and redesign of its supply chain network.
The goal of the study was to analyze the connection between topological features of the supply chain and the resulting supply chain performance.
Obviously Corporate Strategy should have an effect on the supply chain network design and its parameters. In their exploratory study Demeter, Gelei and Jenei (2006) show two examples of how supply chains are affected by different corporate strategies.
Setting
The authors analyzed the supply chains of two major car manufacturers with assemblies in Hungary. The focal companies were Audi and Suzuki. They conducted several interviews with the focal companies themselves and their best rated suppliers.
A very interesting part of Supply Chain Risk Management deals with the impact of uncertainty on the supply chain design process. Van der Vorst and Beulens (2002) address this topic, and focus on the redesign of supply chains.
They claim that sources of uncertainty can be a key driver for chain redesign and after analyzing the literature and own research (case study) they present a tool for supply chain redesign where the sources of uncertainty support the selection of the relevant strategy.
I have been reading a lot of interesting articles lately, hence I could not post as often as I wanted. I found an article by van der Vorst and Beulens (2002; “Identifying sources of uncertainty to generate supply chain redesign strategies”) which opens a new perspective on the SCRM issue. I am going to publish a review later this week and link it here.
Jang et al. (2002): “A combined model of network design and production/distribution planning for a supply network” suggest a framework for integrating the strategic supply chain network design with the operational planning needed for production and distribution.
They make the point that strategical and operational planning should be integrated to find the optimal solution for the company. The following problems are affected.
