Impact-oriented risk management: guiding practitioners towards a resilient supply chain design

ABSTRACT

In times of crisis, resilience has become a popular buzzword in supply chain management as a counterpart to efficiency and lean management. But how can supply chain resilience be addressed by companies and how can a process for assessing it be designed and established? The aim of this paper is to highlight the issue from both a practical and a scientific perspective, and to point the way forward for practical research. We present the strategic concept of an impact-oriented approach that, in contrast to standard risk management, proposes to first analyze the material flows of a supply chain to uncover its vulnerable elements before identifying specific risk events. The approach is flanked by three Practitioner Principles for resource-efficient application: i) use existing data in a reduced and structured manner, ii) examine Key Resilience Areas to assess vulnerabilities, and iii) consider the resilience appetite of supply chain managers.

KEYWORDS:

• Supply chain resilience
• impact-oriented supply chain risk management
• practitioner principles
• key resilience areas
• resilience appetite

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frank Schätter

Frank Schätter is Professor of Supply Chain Processes Management at Pforzheim University, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in Supply Chain Risk Management from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). His teaching and research focus is on modeling, analysis, and optimization of supply chain processes, and especially, measuring supply chain risk and resilience.

Ole Hansen

Ole Hansen (Ph.D. in Supply Chain Management) is a senior supply chain scientist and manager at 4flow AG, Germany. His research interests concentrate on inventory management, supply chain risk management, crisis management, and most recently, the application of machine learning in supply chains.

Florian Haas

Florian Haas is Professor of Purchasing and Supply Management at Pforzheim University, Germany. He has over 15 years of practical experience in several management positions within logistics at Robert Bosch GmbH. Most recently he was responsible for the implementation of a central sea and air freight transport management. His research focuses on the evaluation of purchasing processes.