Managing Disruptions to Supply Chains

For as long as there have been supply chains, there have been disruptions, and no supply chain, logistics system, or infrastructure network is immune to them. Nevertheless, supply-chain disruptions have only recently begun to receive significant attention from practitioners and researchers. One reason for this growing interest is the spate of recent high-profile disruptions, such as September 11, the West Coast port lockout of 2002, and hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Another reason is the focus in recent decades on the philosophy of " lean " supply chains, which calls for slimmed-down systems with little redundancy or slack. Although lean supply chains are efficient when the environment behaves as predicted, they are extremely fragile, and disruptions can leave them virtually paralyzed. Evidently, there is some value to having slack in a system. A third reason for the growing attention paid to disruptions is that firms are much less vertically integrated than they were in the past, and their supply chains are increasingly global. A few decades ago, many firms manufactured products virtually from scratch. For example,