Supply Chain Risk Management

Dear Colleagues,

Complex networks of suppliers, customers, and third-party service providers, as well as large interdependencies among multiple organizations, make the inter-organizational coordination of risks a critical requirement. In the last 20 years, supply chain management practices have developed toward more lean process approaches, in order to increase supply chain effectiveness by reducing costs and eliminating inefficiencies. In contrast, the increasingly volatile market environment has elevated the importance of handling risks that can emerge from the customers’ or demand side, the suppliers’ side, and the manufacturing processes. For example, when Thailand experienced severe flooding in 2011, the crisis not only caused tremendous losses locally, but also paralyzed the supply of automobiles, electronics, and other products in markets half a world away.

In such a context, the supply chain capability to assure continuity can be expressed in terms of resilience. Resilience is a new approach to the design of supply chains and business processes. It is derived from the study of resilience in biological systems, which have a variety of mechanisms for sensing and responding to disturbances or threats. Efforts to identify and mitigate supply chain risks have traditionally focused on operational risks and familiar sources of potential disruption that have caused trouble in the past. However, risks are constantly evolving and can strike from almost anywhere, including sources that are new and unexpected.

We invite both quantitative and qualitative studies, and in particular, we encourage submissions that address issues related (but not limited) to the following areas:

• Supply chain design and resilience
• Forecasting of disruptions
• Case-studies
• Climate related risk
• Disruptions due to resource scarcity
• IT risk in supply chains (e.g., due to DDOs or power failures)
• Gaining competitive advantage in crises
• Black-swan risk

Prof. Dr. Ir Harold Krikke
Dr. Quan Zhu
Guest Editors

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