Building resilience and managing post-disruption supply chain recovery: Lessons from the information and communication technology industry

Abstract

In recent years, major local and global disruptions have had significant adverse effects on corporate performance, particularly for businesses with long, global supply chains. Managing disruption and its effects has therefore become a key focus for firms. While the process of disruption management has attracted considerable research attention, much of it has been directed at the pre-disruption stage. This study investigates the post-disruption stage, and its management. The unpredictability of disruption magnitude and nature suggests that the post-disruption management process may be as important, if not more so, than pre-determined pre-disruption strategies. An effective post-disruption management process would directly affect actual ability to recover from sudden and serious disruptions. This study analyzes six companies, variously positioned upstream and downstream in the supply chain of the information and communications technology (ICT) industry in Taiwan. Specific factors and strategies relating to the post-disruption management process were collected by conducting in-depth interviews with the managers and executives of the firms. The information was categorized into distinct disruption management process stages: discovery, recovery, and supply chain redesign. The study findings are interesting and at times, new and counter-intuitive, including the surprising positive effects of clustering in disruptions, and the role of back-up supplier and material verification in disruption recovery. The study emerges with an integrated framework that can be utilized to establish an effective post-disruption management process. The framework is used to develop research propositions for future research.