A Qualitative Approach for Assessing Resiliency in Supply Chains

Abstract

The ultimate goal of this study is to develop a comprehensive and competitive management system to enhance resilience capability of supply chains. In addition, the study aims to identify and eliminate barriers affecting resilience by identifying the factors may cause trouble in the near future. The theoretical framework was established to summarize the significant finding in the area of resilient supply chain and as a guideline for the empirical part. A qualitative approach based on multi criteria decision making process has been adopted in order to gather data through in-depth interviews. The developed method to evaluate resilience capability through supply chains piloted in a sample of five companies involved in an automotive supply chain.

Managing Capabilities for Supply Chain Resilience Through it Integration

“…Mensah & Merkuryev (2014) identified the main factors that are essential for supply chain resilience -decision making, strategy, and tactics (DMST) -and proposed practices to gain resilience: Lean production with JIT delivery and low inventory, Six sigma supply chain, Increasing SC flexibility, and Developing a strong corporate culture. Nikookar et al (2014) indicated that there are significant gaps between experiences and expectations of the implementation performance of resilient practices. Therefore, there is a need to understand the approaches to supply chain resilience to provide better orientation to practices.…”

“…However, the challenge of shifting trends and the constant disturbances of the market increase the instability of the supply chain. Recent scientific literature amplifies the supply chain resilience problem and recommends various strategies to cope with the disturbances (Ambulkar, Blackhurst & Grawe, 2015;Elleuch, Dafaoui, Elmhamedi & Chabchoub, 2016;Gonçalves & Chicareli, 2014;Kim, Chen & Linderman, 2015;Mensah & Merkuryev, 2014;Munoz & Dunbar, 2015;Nikookar, Takala, Sahebi & Kantola, 2014). There are different approaches to define and measure resilience in the supply chain.…”

Operationalising resilience in tropical agricultural value chains

“…Flexibility and agility are often used interchangeably in the literature. Nikookar et al (2014) defined flexibility as the speed with which a system responds to disruption; this definition has also been ascribed to agility (Christopher and Peck, 2004). Rice and Caniato (2003) described flexibility as the creation of capabilities to respond to disruptions.…”

“…According to Charles et al (2010), flexibility is a precursor attribute that lays the foundation for other elements such as agility, and it is established via pre-event investment (Nikookar et al, 2014). This investment allows for the development of internal capacities through mitigation and contingency strategies like flexibility in production, contracts, procurement and distribution (Chowdhury and Quaddus, 2016).…”

“…The content analysis points to two broad approaches that have been adopted to quantify supply chain resilience. The first approach determines a system's state of resilience by developing measurable indexes (Brandon-Jones et al, 2014; Figure 7 The conceptual framework for analysing resilience in agricultural value chains Nikookar et al, 2014;Tierney and Bruneau, 2007), referred to as index-based operationalisation. Examples of these indexes include the supply chain resilience index (Soni et al, 2014), aggregate resilient index (Munoz and Dunbar, 2015) and integral time absolute error (Spiegler et al, 2012).…”