A Strategic Process to Manage Collaborative Risks in Supply Chain Networks (SCN) to Improve Resilience and Sustainability

Abstract

Resilience and sustainability are two critical factors in supply chain networks (SCNs) to assure business continuity and achieve competitive advantages. Due to the dynamic interconnections between the several parts that comprise a typical SCN such as customers, organizations, sites, departments, geographies, and so on, efficient collaboration between all parts is vital to assure business success, especially in times of uncertainty and unpredictable disruption. Collaborative risks such as poor communication, deficient information exchange, lack of trust, lack or deficient access or reach, just to name a few, that essentially emerge as a result from a shift toward one of the extremes of the collaborative dimension (lack of collaboration or collaborative overload) are very often invisible; however, they are responsible for undesired outcomes such as production defects and delivery delays, just to name a few. In this work, a strategic process to identify and manage collaborative risks in SCNs to help improve resilience and sustainability is proposed. The proposed strategic process analysis contains three key SCN’s collaborative dimensions ((1) network access or reach, (2) trust, and (3) communication) applying graph centrality metrics, looking for emergent collaborative risks in a quantitative way that potentially may threaten an organization’s efficiency and performance, and thus negatively impact resilience and sustainability. A case study conducted in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic is illustrated to describe how organization benefit regarding the timely and quantitative identification of potential behavioral patterns that lead to one of the collaborative extremes. The results show that the application proposed strategic process is very successful in ensuring sustainability improving resilience of SCNs.