Integrated detection of disruption scenarios, the ripple effect dispersal and recovery paths in supply chains

Abstract

The studies on supply chain (SC) disruption management frequently assume the existence of some negative scenarios and suggest ways to proactively protect and reactively recover the SC operations and performance if such scenarios occur. Though, there is a paucity of research on how to support methodologically the detection of realistic disruption scenarios, ideally of different risk aversion degrees. The contribution of our study lies in a conceptualization of a new methodical approach to the detection of disruption scenarios, ripple effect dispersal and recovery paths in supply chains on the basis of structural genomes. The objective is to integrate and expand the existing knowledge gained isolated in robustness analysis and recovery planning into a comprehensive framework for building a theory as well as for managerial purposes. The outcomes of this research constitute a useful decision-making support tool that allows detecting disruption scenarios at different risk-aversion levels based on the quantification of the structural robustness with the use of the genome method and observing the scope of disruption propagation, i.e., the ripple effect. The advantage of using a robustness computation by the genome method is that this allows detecting both the disruption scenarios of different severity, the ripple effect dispersal, and the corresponding recovery paths. Our results can be of value for decision-makers to compare different supply chain structural designs regarding the robustness and to identify disruption scenarios that interrupt the supply chain operations to different extents. The scenario detection can be further used for identifying optimal reconfiguration paths to deploy proactive contingency and reactive recovery policies. We show a correlation between the risk aversion degree of disruption scenarios and the outcomes of the reconfiguration policies.