Increasing supply chain resilience in a global sourcing context

Abstract

Managing risk has emerged as an issue of critical importance for today's globalised supply chains. This article focuses on inbound supply risk in a global sourcing context, where increased distances between sources of supply and final markets add uncertainty to supply continuity through longer and more variable lead times. After an in-depth analysis of international supply process vulnerability, this article identifies a set of approaches for managing risk in order to enhance supply chain resilience. Then, a simulation-based framework for assessing the effectiveness of the proposed approaches was developed and applied on a real case.

Keywords:

• supply chain risk management
• resilience
• inbound supply risk analysis
• international transportation
• global sourcing