A New Resilience Measure for Supply Chain Networks

Abstract

Currently, supply chain networks can span the whole world, and any disruption of these networks may cause economic losses, decreases in sales and unsustainable supplies. Resilience, the ability of the system to withstand disruption and return to a normal state quickly, has become a new challenge during the supply chain network design. This paper defines a new resilience measure as the ratio of the integral of the normalized system performance within its maximum allowable recovery time after the disruption to the integral of the performance in the normal state. Using the maximum allowable recovery time of the system as the time interval under consideration, this measure allows the resilience of different systems to be compared on the same relative scale, and be used under both scenarios that the system can or cannot restore in the given time. Two specific resilience measures, the resilience based on the amount of product delivered and the resilience based on the average delivery distance, are provided for supply chain networks. To estimate the resilience of a given supply chain network, a resilience simulation method is proposed based on the Monte Carlo method. A four-layered hierarchial mobile phone supply chain network is used to illustrate the resilience quantification process and show how network structure affects the resilience of supply chain networks.

Turning Farmers into Business Partners through Value Co-Creation Projects. Insights from the Coffee Supply Chain

“…In particular, the focus on short-term objectives to spend their money underlined the fact that the farmers had a low capacity to recognize the challenges to their business continuation or to invest in education for their children, thus augmenting their future chances of participating in business development or of contributing to economic value creation within the coffee community. In contrast, the respondents who stated that they were more focused on cash flow, production, better pricing, and capabilities transfer to their successors (i.e., youth inclusion) highlighted a more enhanced attitude toward facing factors such as market and pricing instability, reduced trading capability, and business continuation, confirming what supported by the literature on empowerment [1][2][3]7,8]. Such vulnerability factors could be minimized in the future, since such farmers responded that in five years they hoped to be better trained, more able to gain quality certification, and in a better position to invest in their own businesses.…”

“…Doing so allows those involved to switch to a network logic in which all stakeholders can bring value to the relationships they establish and the activities they conduct, either conjointly or individually [1,16,40]. This situation benefits not only farmers' own livelihoods but also increases the resilience of the whole coffee supply chain by moderating some of the most concerning vulnerability factors [2,3].…”

“…By developing the framework, the authors seek to advance the academic debate on value co-creation involving low-power stakeholders, which seems to be in need of further development of qualitative evaluation methods for value co-creation [9,15,17,19,27,28,33]. Second, the author conceptualized a direct link between empowerment, value co-creation and supply chain resilience [1,3,7,8,10,14]. It has been demonstrated that empowerment actions are key enablers for increasing the partnership creation within value co-creation projects, enhancing their outcomes and augmenting the resilience of the supply chain.…”

“…Globalized supply chains have increased in both complexity and vulnerability in recent years [1][2][3][4] for several reasons, including growing outsourcing [5], redistribution of resources and power inequalities [6][7][8], stakeholders' interdependent linkages and tangled relationships [9], and cultural and geographical barriers that create differences in knowledge, understanding, and relational influences [10]. Firms at the center of such complex mechanisms of relationships, sourcing, and production are thus required to develop and implement strategic actions that can anticipate and overcome vulnerability factors to increase supply chain resilience while continuing to create value for all stakeholders [2,[11][12][13].…”

Optimum Resilient Operation and Control DC Microgrid Based Electric Vehicles Charging Station Powered by Renewable Energy Sources

“…It has become a new challenge facing the EV charging station design [26]. A related key performance indicator (KPI) is the percent of sessions with a low charging time ratio to the total charging time divided by the amount of total connection time [27,28]. However, these sessions are often a burden during peak hours and daytime.…”