Examining the resiliency of intertwined supply networks: a jury-rigging perspective

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the salience of different supply networks merging together to provide critical products in short supply. The automotive supply network and the medical device supply network, for instance, became intertwined to meet rising demands for ventilators. As such, coming to the fore is a search mechanism, based on recombination of multiple components, conceptualized as jury-rigging behavior. Designing and changing the interdependencies across firms/supply chains become relevant. Drawing on complex adaptive systems and Ashby's law of requisite variety, we use a computational model to examine these mechanisms’ isolated and combined effect on supply chain network resiliency. Our results show statistically significant difference in the adaptiveness and mortality rate between a jury-rigged supply chain network and a non-jury-rigged one. In particular, the effect of jury-rigging is diminished by the level of coupling among the supply chains.

KEYWORDS:

• Intertwined supply networks
• jury-rigging
• NK simulation
• resiliency
• COVID-19

Acknowledgment

This research was conducted with the support of a research fund from the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) granted by the Malaysia Ministry of higher education. The authors also thank Mohammad Al Saman for his help with computer simulation coding.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Especially the effects that span the extended supply chains (i.e., ripple effects, clockspeed effects, and bullwhip effects) are well described by scale-free, nonlinear dynamics. Scheinkman and Woodford (1994) articulate it based on extreme events and scale-free theories spanning multiple inter-connected economic sectors.

2 Underlying processes of self-organization are positive feedback loops, constructive conflicts, and cascade effects (Albert, Kreutzer, and Lechner 2015)

3 The enacted/interpreted environment for CAS is described as the relevant task and institutional contexts that agents interact with while the external environment captures factors outside the boundary of the CAS.

4 Levinthal and Warglien (1999) described it as shifting and deforming the fitness landscape due to competition or collaboration among the firms. Kauffman (1993) termed this as ‘dancing landscapes’.

5 The characterization of fitness landscape in our setting is a blend of theoretical ideas of Thomson (1967) and the random interdependencies among the decision elements in original Kauffman (1993) and Levinthal (1997).

6 Cross-component search resonates with supply base in supply network literature (Choi and Krause 2006). The supply base are the suppliers in the network that a focal firm actively deal with.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundamental Research Grants Scheme from Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education.

Notes on contributors

Javad Feizabadi

Javad Feizabadi is an associate professor of operations and supply chain management at Asia School of Business (in collaboration with MIT Sloan School of Management). Dr. Feizabadi’s primary research interest focuses on designing supply chains by understanding system’s interdependencies to explore the performance and adaptiveness of supply chains in a constantly changing and rugged performance landscape. He has published in several international scholarly journals such as Strategic Management Journal, International Journal of Production Economics, International Journal of Physical Distributions and Logistics Management, Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, among others.

David M. Gligor

David Gligor received his PhD from the University of Tennessee. He has published over 70 peer reviewed academic articles and his work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Business Logistics, Journal of Operations Management, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Business Research, and Decision Sciences.

Thomas Y. Choi

Thomas Choi, PhD Thomas Choi is a Professor of Supply Chain Management at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He leads the study of the upstream side of supply chains, where a buying company interfaces with many suppliers organized in various forms of networks. He has published articles in the Academy of Management Executive, Decision Sciences Journal, Decision Support Systems, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Management, Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, Production and Operations Management, and others.He currently serves as co-director of the Complex Adaptive Supply Networks Research Accelerator (CASN-RA), an international research group of scholars interested in supply networks. He has also worked with numerous public and private organizations including LG Electronics, Samsung, Toyota, Volvo, the U.S. Department of Energy, and a federal government think tank. He has co-authored three practitioner books on supply management including one recently published on Supply Chain Financing. Most recently, he served as the lead volume editor of the Oxford Handbook of Supply Chain Management.From 2014 to 2019, he served as Harold E. Fearon Chair of Purchasing Management and Executive Director of CAPS Research, a joint venture between Arizona State University and the Institute for Supply Management. From 2011 to 2014, he served as co-editor in chief for the Journal of Operations Management. Currently, he is involved in helping to develop a supply chain research center in Ghana, Africa, as part of the $15 million project from USAID.In 2012, he was recognized as the Distinguished Operations Management Scholar by the OM Division at the Academy of Management. Since 2018, he has been listed as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Web of Science for having ‘multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year.’ Recently, he was ranked one among the ‘top 50 researchers by publication score’ based on SCM papers appearing in a set of seven leading journals over a 15 year period.