Cass Business School, City University of London

Supply Chain Rsks

The global market is currently characterised by uncertainty and instability since demand is changing in every industrial sector. Therefore, companies have to face an agile environment and they have to be prepared to every single change in order to continue to exist. It is essential for companies to follow the trends of the market so as to be successful since product and technology life cycles are shorter, supply chains tend to outsource and international supply networks are becoming more complex.
On a daily basis, companies of all sizes are experiencing a multitude of challenges and risks regarding their supply chains in the highly competitive environment. This is very interesting since these disruptions are derived not only from external events such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks or government policies, but also from alterations within the companies, such as changing strategies. Supply chain risks concerns any threat of interruption in the supply chain and come in many different forms such as financial risks, market risks, complexity of network risks and decision risks. We are going to analyse these in more details during the research.
All companies have to consider that supply chain risk management is a systematic process so as to avoid unwanted events and unessential changes in the supply chain. Hence, companies have to set up several models in order to map all partners and elements that they are involved in the supply chain, to identify potential risks, to assess risk, to manage and mitigate risk and finally to implement the models in the supply chain. This process is a hedge against risk in companies� operations, and the lack of this process is, of course, a risk itself.
During our research we aim to identify all factors that are responsible for generating disruptions in the supply chain and the possible ways of avoiding these disruptions. As external risks cannot be managed by companies, we will focus our research on internal risk.