Evidence Based Disruption Management

A crucial challenge for nowadays supply chain networks is represented by their resilience, intended as the capability of ensuring business continuity in presence of disruptive events. Given the high interdependencies among nodes within a network, strategies to mitigate disruption impact must consider not only a single firm, but the entire network. However, the development of strategies to enhance network resilience faces significant difficulties. Among them, a key factor often highlighted in literature is the lack of transparency within the chain. Indeed, usually different partners in a SC are only aware of their own function/products within the chain, while an overview of the overall chain, with corresponding dependencies among the nodes, is missing. This often results in a lot of uncertainty for the companies when it comes to react to disruptions. This project intends to address this issue by developing novel methodologies and tools to allow companies to visualize their supply chain networks, and to investigate how the related processes are interconnected. Visualizing the network will lead to a) improve network transparency, and b) supporting decisions via both financial and operational actions to recover from occurred disruptions. This network will enable quantitative analysis on how disruptions propagate through the network which, in turn, will enable the development of disruption early-detection systems aimed to timely notify companies when a disruption in the network is likely to impact their processes. Furthermore, previously occurred disruptions on the built networks will be studied, to derive best practices in reaction and recovery strategies from which recommendations to face current disruption can be built. These goals are linked to the following Dinalog´s innovation themes: Supply Chain Management; Data driven Logistics; ICT & Provision of Information; and Customs and Trade.