Supply chain vulnerability: environment changes and dependencies

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Increased globalization of supply and consumer markets, along with the trend toward outsourcing have contributed to become wider the complexity and the uncertainty of the supply chains. Also, a set of changes that have emerged on the environment of organisations/supply chains and the adoption of some business philosophies have contributed to increase the dependencies among them. Other factors have contributed to the same, such as: customers demand, shorter product' life-cycles and some specific management practices. Organisations, integrated in a SC, are becoming quite vulnerable since they depend on their partners to survive and to be competitive on the market. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the supply chains vulnerability. To attain this objective the major organisations' environment changes that have occurred in the last decades are identified and some business philosophies are pointed out as the main responsible for an increase on supply chains dependencies and consequently supply chains vulnerability. A conceptual framework and a case study in automotive industry are developed in order to identify the main factors that could become supply chains more vulnerable and consequently to leave managers think about which operational measures should be adopted to increase supply chains' responsiveness to disruptions that may occur from organisations' environment
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)41-56
JournalInternational Journal of Logistics and Transport
Volume2
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 2008

Keywords

  • Supply chain
  • Environment changes
  • Dependencies
  • vulnerability

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