Background

Over the last two decades, companies have continuously searched for ways to increase the effectiveness and the efficiency of their supply chains. As a result, companies have increasingly implemented lean principles and heavily invested in supply chain integration to link up with their external partners in the network. Ironically, however, the high levels of efficiency companies have strived for, frequently comes at the cost of increased vulnerability to disruptions: even small, localized events can escalate rapidly thereby disrupting business continuity and sustainable performance of a chain. For example, 81% of the companies experience a supply chain disruption at least once per year, out of which 23% suffer more than €1M in costs associated with a single incident. A container ship breaking into pieces, a delayed truck, fire in a factory of a main supplier, adverse weather conditions, or a breakdown of IT systems were just a few of the examples of causes that we found in our initial investigations.

As supply chains are the backbones of the global economy as well as a major influence on the social and natural business environments, there is an urgent requirement to find new ways of dealing with and overcoming inevitable supply chain disruptions and uncertainty. Resilient supply chains have the ability to accurately respond to unforeseen disruptive events, and to quickly restore the chains’ original performance level, thereby limiting negative social, economic and even environmental effects. Therefore, it is critically important for organizations to enhance resilience while maintaining supply chain efficiency.