The impacts of minor disruptions on a production system: Empirical analysis of assembly line data

Abstract

Supply chain disruptions pose significant risks to production systems. Unfortunately, the number of publications that study the real-life impacts of supply chain disruptions on production systems is extremely small, and the question of how these disruptions affect production systems has not been fully investigated. This research seeks to fill this gap using assembly-line data from a vehicle manufacturer in China. With these data, the authors estimated econometric models to assess the impacts of minor disruptions on production using two different metrics: daily output in terms of number of vehicles manufactured, and the disruption duration in minutes. Time-dependent effects were also considered to assess the extent to which the effects of disruptions on daily output and disruption duration change over time. The resulting models were analysed to identify which disruption factors are the most impactful in terms of daily output and disruption duration.

Keywords:

• Supply chain disruption
• minor disruptions
• production system
• assembly line data

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mengna Wu

Dr. Mengna Wu is a passionate researcher in the area of operational improvement in automobile supply chain. She is an associate professor in ShanDong Normal University. Her main research topics are applications of operations research and data analysis to optimise the supply chain management.

Jose Holguin Veras

Dr. Jose Holguin-Veras is the William H. Hart Professor and Director of the Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems, and the Centre for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2013 White House’s Transportation Champion of Change Award, the 1996 Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award, and the 2001 National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award. He is the most widely published and cited freight researcher in the world. His research interests are in the areas of freight transportation modelling and economics, and humanitarian logistics.