2008/11/04

A Future Research Agenda for Supply Chain Risk Management

When Manuj and Mentzer (2008) wrote their article titled Global Supply Chain Risk Management, they used Ghoshal (1987) Global Strategy: An Organizing Framework for developing sources of risk and Jüttner, Peck and Christopher (2003) Supply Chain Risk Management: Outlining an Agenda for Future Research for developing risk mitigation strategies. However, THAT is not why I am taking a closer look at the latter today. What brought said paper to my attention were the two simple figures it used. Why are the figures so striking?

Supply Chain Risk Management – a basic construct

In defining supply chain risk management, Jüttner et al. use four basic contructs: 1) Sources of risk, which lead to 2) Adverse Consequences of risk, instigated by 3) Drivers of risk and possibly offset by 4) Mitigation strategies.

Supply Chain Risk Management - adapted from Jüttner, Peck and Christopher (2003)

Supply Chain Risk Management - from Jüttner, Peck and Christopher (2003)

These four constructs are used throughout the article and seen as sequential steps in the managerial process of addressing supply chain risk. It is a simplification, yet, at the same time, it opens up many new avenues that all converge towards the starting point, rather than diverge from it. In addressing the risk, they identify four separate risk mitigating strategies: 1) Avoidance, 2) Control, 3) Co-Operation and 4) Flexibility.

Supply Chain Risk Management – risk sources

In a similarly simple manner like the above figure, in a second figure the sources of risk are broadly categorized along 3 different levels: 1) Organizational risk, 2) Network (or Supply Chain)-related risk, and 3) Environmental risk.

Supply Chain Risk Sources - adapted from Jüttner, Peck and Christopher (2003)

Supply Chain Risk Sources - from Jüttner, Peck and Christopher (2003)

In my opinion this figure perfectly manages to sum up the three different levels of supply chain risk. However, I haven’t yet seen any later paper that picks up along these lines.

Reference

Jüttner, U., Peck, H., & Christopher, M. (2003). Supply chain risk management: outlining an agenda for future research International Journal of Logistics, 6 (4), 197-210 DOI: 10.1080/13675560310001627016