Identifying critical success resilience factors in a supply chain using fuzzy DEMATEL method

Abstract

This study investigates supply chain (SC) disruptions in order to present a conceptual framework in line with evaluating and improving resiliency in SC networks. The SCs resiliency may be affected by various different factors and certainly simultaneously improving all factors is impossible. So practitioners need to find out the most important factors to improve those factors. This study segmenting complex influencing resilience factors into groups to improve them in a stepwise way. For this purpose, based on the literature reviews, key resilience factors were recognised and redefined for SC networks. Then, decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method is used to identify critical success resilience factors in SCs. To this end, a questionnaire is constructed and answered by experts to obtain the degree of the direct affect between each pair of capabilities. To deal with uncertainties associated with expert's judgments, fuzzy theory is employed. With this method, practitioners can identify the factors that have greatest impact on SCs resiliency and the casual relations among the factors are constructed through a cause-effect relationship diagram. The proposed policy is to help managers to identify the most appropriate strategy for surviving SCs from disruptions.