شناسایی مسائل ریسک و پیشرفت تحقیقات در مدیریت ریسک زنجیره تامین

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the research development in supply chain risk management (SCRM), which has shown an increasing global attention in recent years. Literature survey and citation/co-citation analysis are used to fulfil the research task. Literature survey has undertaken a thorough search of articles on selected journals relevant to supply chain operations management. Meanwhile, citation/co-citation analysis uses Web of Sciences database to disclose SCRM development between 1995 and 2009. Both the approaches show similar trends of rising publications over the past 15 years. This review has piloted us to identify and classify the potential risk associated with different flows, namely material, cash and information flows. Consequently, we identify some research gaps. Even though there is a pressing need and awareness of SCRM from industrial aspect, quantitative models in the field are relatively lacking and information flow risk has received less attention. It is also interesting to observe the evolutions and advancements of SCRM discipline. One finding is that the intellectual structure of the field made statistically significant increase during 2000–2005 and evolved from passively reacting to vague general issues of disruptions towards more proactively managing supply chain risk from system perspectives.

Production in the early years was simple, with single flow of products moving from raw material suppliers, to manufacturers and then to markets. Nowadays, shorter product lifecycle and increasing demand among all have led to a complicated supply chain. Due to cost pressure and competitive advantages, companies are adopting globalization and outsourcing strategies. This also requires an extended supply chain network, hence increases the nodes in the system. In addition, many companies have introduced lean production concepts, which intend to remove “wastes” from a supply chain, for instance, by reducing the number of suppliers. This helps in smoothing the operations but it would also create problems if unexpected events happen in a supply chain. The rising use of internet helps supply network in sharing information visibility (Christopher and Lee, 2004, Lee, 2002, Lee, 2004 and Narayanan and Raman, 2004). It is indubitable that the emerging uses of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions such as Oracle and SAP have cut down the information transaction time and reduced the incidents of inaccuracy and redundancy. Vast assistance from these systems has, however, exposed to another consequence, namely information disruption. All the above changes have inevitably increased the importance of supply chain risk management (SCRM). One typical example is Ericsson’s crisis in 2000. Since a single-source policy was used, a fire accident in its chips’ supplier immediately disrupted the material supply. Ericsson’s loss was estimated to reach USD 400 million in the T28 model (Norrman and Jansson, 2004). In June 2008, Volvo Cars reported 28% reduction of sales compared with the same period in previous year, with the biggest loss in its SUVs for about 50%. Fredrik Arp, CEO of Volvo Cars stated that “the weak dollar reduces the revenue and it will further reduce the opportunities for R&D”. Another example is the Taiwan earthquake in December 2006, which caused breakage in undersea cables and slowed down internet. One immediate effect is a prolonged waiting time of containers in the Shanghai sea port in China, since all claim procedures rely on information systems. Nature disaster, terrorist attack, labor strike, accidents can all be the causes for supply chain disruption and delay ( Berger et al., 2004, Christopher and Lee, 2004, LaLonde, 2004, Norrman and Jansson, 2004, Poirier et al., 2007, Quinn, 2006 and Tang, 2006a). The above examples show that any material, financial or information risk could create problems in a supply chain. Any hiccup transpired within the supply chain will cause delay and even disruption (Buzacott, 1971). Disruption does not only halt the supply chain operations but without preparation and precaution, it takes time for the affected system to recover (Sheffi and Rice, 2005; Hendricks and Singhal, 2005. The above background provides the motivation to investigate the current trend and issues in SCRM. Our main objective is through literature review to (i) define the important risk issues and mitigation techniques in SCRM; (ii) understand the research trend both from industrial and academic perspectives; and (iii) identify the possible research gaps and opportunities in the field.

In this paper, we have reviewed recent literature relevant to SCRM. The research tendency of the field has been investigated. Empirical evidences have shown severe consequences after supply chain disruptions, such as loss of profit, damage of market share, etc. This leads to a general increasing interest in SCRM. The need of having an integrated view of SCRM has been growing strong, according to the co-citation analysis. SCRM definitely needs an integration of knowledge from multiple researches disciplinary. In addition, the future analysis tools should aim at proactively managing the supply chain risk. Major risk issues and risk mitigation techniques have been investigated based on material, cash and information flows. The summary is presented in Table 3, Table 4 and Table 5, which further indicates some research gaps. Most literature still focuses on material flow issues in risk management, in particular with supplier selection. Some efforts have been made to integrate material and cash flows by adapting financial option theory. According to our literature survey, there is a lacking of models in analyzing the risk associated with information flows, possibly due to missing of appropriate modeling techniques in this area. The study also indicates a larger number of publications in business journals. In addition, the existing literature includes mainly descriptive and conceptual models rather than quantitative models. Hence, there is a pressing need (or awareness) of studying risk management issues from industrial practice, whereas there is a missing gap and potential in developing quantitative models to make hard decisions in managing the risk. Regarding the possible modeling techniques and approaches in this research area, we propose the following potential methods in developing quantitative models for risk management: Robust planning: This planning approach aims at exploring the uncertainty inherent in a supply chain, and developing optimization decisions which provide more predictable results. For instance at strategic decision level, how to design a supply chain so that key performance indicators have stable outcomes for different production scenarios. At operational level, we should investigate which control policy needs less modification with a changing production environment. Also it is of interest to investigate the institutional aspects of supply chain, namely, with updated conditions and institutional constraints, how the previous supply chain decisions can be modified. This involves not only the robustness of a decision, but also the (re)computational efficiency of the optimization algorithms. One advantage of this approach is due to its proactive planning capability. Revenue management: As we have mentioned in this paper, most supply chain risk study focus on supply side. But with a supply disruption, we can still use different pricing policies to redistribute customer’s demand for different products so as to mitigate the supply risk. Such a policy was used by Dell when they faced a chips supply problem in Taiwan. In this case, revenue management can be used to develop pricing policy and investigate how to allocate and relocate capacity to different market segments when supply chain encounters a disruption. Agency theory: Supply chain disruption often creates asymmetric and incomplete information. In addition, goal confliction, adverse selection, moral hazard can be frequent phenomenon in supply chain which further damages the supply chain performance. Risk sharing is often suggested to reduce the vulnerability of a supply chain, in both the cases of normal operation and disruption. Different incentive policies are also used in practice (for instance cash donation by LG to its customer during the China earthquake 2008) to recover the cash flows in a supply chain during crisis. Agency theory can therefore be appropriate to understand inter-relationship between supply chains, and thus maintain a system perspective in management. Option theory: Option nowadays has been used as a standard tool to buffer financial risks in a company. Integrating real and financial options should definitely enhance the performance of a supply chain, in particularly in a global production environment. This should concern not only strategic/tactic decisions such as supplier selection, supplier switch, but also operational decisions such as speculation inventory, invoicing currency, etc. Thus it provides chance to integrate different flows in supply chain. System dynamics: This modeling approach is often used to understand and analyze a supply chain and its inherent control policies. A typical example is applying such method to investigate the bullwhip effect in a supply chain. It is important to understand the disperse mechanism after a disruption “shock” is received in a supply chain. How long it will take to translate disruption information to other nodes of a supply chain? How long it will take to recover from a shock with different control policies? Moreover, a supply chain may overreact and build excess capacity during a risk event. Control theory and system dynamics approach could be very promising in modeling risk information flows. Reverse logistics: Reverse logistics has captured substantial attention in recent years due to environmental legislation and economic incentives. In auto industry, remanufacturing return cores has been used as an alternative to supply service market. Can we use the similar business concept and use return products as a backup (of materials) in a supply chain? This should provide a chance to enhance supply reliability and in the meantime reduce capital tied up. Understanding comprehensively what risk is, where risk exists, and how to mitigate risk definitely exhibits an additional research challenge in supply chain management. However, with an increasing awareness of risk management issues, both from industrial and academic aspects, we believe that developing risk management models should improve a supply chain competence in the new business environment and definitely it is a promising and important research area in operations management.