An empirically derived agenda of critical research issues for managing supply-chain disruptions

Abstract

While the literature related to supply-chain disruptions is informative, it has primarily focused on supply-chain disruptions from a general or high-level view of the phenomenon (e.g. supply-chain uncertainty, risk perceptions). Additionally, although most would agree that disruptions are present in all supply chains, there is a limited amount of information on how to deal with them from a practical perspective in both the short term and long term. Because of the importance of and research needs within this area, we launched a major multi-industry, multi-methodology empirical study on supply-chain disruptions. The study is multi-faceted in that it seeks insights into many issues within the broad area of global sourcing and supply-chain disruptions. Throughout our various interactions with industry, we found that several common themes and issues surfaced as being critical to successful disruption analysis and mitigation as well as resilient supply-chain design. Within this paper, we report on these key issues and discuss the needs within the supply-chain research to contribute to them.