Supply Chain Risk Management

In his fourth video podcasts Professor Richard Wilding talks about Supply Chain Strategies. I found it quite interesting, so I would like to give you a short summary of it here. If you are interested you can just download the podcast for free, you find a link in the reference section.

Hierarchy
Strategies are usually broken down into smaller pieces so that every function within a company has its own individual goals. This leads to some kind of hierarchy like:

• Corporate Strategy
• Competitive Strategy
  for each market segment, mostly driven by marketing
• Supply Chain Strategy
  derived from the competitive strategy, has to be developed together with marketing to secure alignment

Perhaps this research by Pero et al. can support small and medium sized companies with the design and redesign of its supply chain network.
The goal of the study was to analyze the connection between topological features of the supply chain and the resulting supply chain performance.

Method and Model
The authors used simulation techniques and statistical analysis to simulate a pull based supply network. The network consists of a retailer-, distributor- and manufacturer-level.
Demand and lead times were random, the supply chain performance was measured with stock outs that occured.

Obviously Corporate Strategy should have an effect on the supply chain network design and its parameters. In their exploratory study Demeter, Gelei and Jenei (2006) show two examples of how supply chains are affected by different corporate strategies.