How to Handle Disruptions in Supply Chains – An Integrated Framework and a Review of Literature

Abstract

This paper describes an integrated framework for handling disruptions in supply chains. The integrated framework incorporates two main views on managing disruptions, namely pre- and post-disruption views, which are usually treated as separate issues in existing frameworks described in literature. The proposed integrated framework is used to structure literature review on the supply chain risk and disruption management. The literature review gives an overview of key aspects and specific methods which can be used for each step in the framework. Finally, two main observations in the existing literature on supply chain risk/disruption management are discussed. The first observation is that the literature has not uniformly discussed different parts of the framework. In general, the post-disruption process for managing supply chain disruptions has received relatively less attention than pre-disruption activities. The second observation which can be regarded as a direction for future research is lack of quantitative studies involving modeling and simulation to support the decision makers in better handling supply chain disruption.