This research, motivated by a real-life case study in a highly competitive automobile supply chain, experimentally studies the impact of disruption on the competitiveness of supply chains. The studied supply chain faces two major risks: disruption of suppliers and tough competition from competitors. Any disruption in upstream level of the supply chain leads to an inability to meet demand downstream and causes market share to be lost to the competitors. For such a setting, a resilient topology is redesigned that can recover from and react quickly to any disruptive incidents. To this aim, we speculate there are three policies that can be used to mitigate the disruption risk, namely keeping emergency stock at the retailers, reserving back-up capacity at the suppliers, and multiple-sourcing. The problem is addressed using a mixed integer non-linear model to find the most profitable network and mitigation policies. We design a piecewise linear method to solve the model.Based on the data extracted from an automotive supply chain, practical insights of the research are extracted in a controlled experiment. Our analysis suggests that implementing risk mitigation policies not only work to the advantage of the supply chain by sustaining and improving its market share but also benefit customers by stabilizing retail prices in the market. Using the case study, we analyze the contribution of each risk strategy in stabilizing the supply chain's profit, market share, and retail price. Our analysis reveals that downstream "emergency stock" is the most preferable risk mitigation strategy if suppliers are unreliable.
This paper investigates how organization should design their supply chains (SCs) and use risk mitigation strategies to meet different performance objectives. To do this, we develop two mixed integer nonlinear (MINL) lean and responsive models for a four-tier SC to understand these four strategies: i) holding back-up emergency stocks at the DCs, ii) holding back-up emergency stock for transshipment to all DCs at a strategic DC (for risk pooling in the SC), iii) reserving excess capacity in the facilities, and iv) using other facilities in the SC's network to back-up the primary facilities. A new method for designing the network is developed which works based on the definition of path to cover all possible disturbances. To solve the two proposed MINL models, a linear regression approximation is suggested to linearize the models; this technique works 2 based on a piecewise linear transformation. The efficiency of the solution technique is tested for two prevalent distribution functions. We then explore how these models operate using empirical data from an automotive SC. This enables us to develop a more comprehensive risk mitigation framework than previous studies and show how it can be used to determine the optimal SC design and risk mitigation strategies given the uncertainties faced by practitioners and the performance objectives they wish to meet.
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