Supply chain risk management and flexibility to manage the disturbances of global crises

Abstract

A global crisis successfully creates conflicts, which endanger the performance of the automotive supply chain with its total actors. Risk management throughout a worldwide crisis necessitates dissimilar techniques and procedures to the risk management perspective and approaches practiced for a steady market and stable situations, in order to overcome the supply chain vulnerabilities and disruptions towards the triggered issues of suppliers and demand. The main purpose of this paper, unlike the previous works, is to implement innovative tactics and means to make the supply chain of the automotive industry more resilient and flexible towards global crises to minimize the damages, taking the automotive industry's performance within the Coronavirus pandemic as a field of study and the juxtaposed complications presented in parallel from suppliers and customers to result in a robust technique to create strategic flexibility and balance for production units to manage the jeopardies within and post the global crises. This research, using the analytical hierarchical process for the assessment of the vertical collaboration alternatives, enables the supply chain actors to adopt the most adequate alternative for each category of risks and actors. However, the limitations presented for this study are to overcome the need for risk mitigation by preventing the appearance and bringing the probability to zero percent of the presence of the risks in the whole supply chain of the automotive industry.