Management of a holistic supply chain network for proactive resilience: Theory and case study

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel theory for managing a holistic supply chain network, for proactive resilience. A holistic or inter-industrial supply chain network (H-SCN for short), is a system with the nature that several supply chain networks intertwine and inter-dependent to each other to form a more sophisticated network. It is believed that management of such a supply chain network has a close tie to financial crisis in 2008 and subsequent global economic recession. By proactive resilience it is meant that the disruption of supply business in future could be avoided at large if not all. The proposed theory includes a model that represents the economic health of a firm in the context of a supply-demand network. The model captures not only a firm's own resource and capability but also its supplier (upstream firm) and its consumer (downstream firm). How the resilience of such an H-SCN system can be enhanced is demonstrated by a potential technique to share the information of the health state of firm and the knowledge of disruptions over the entire network in future if one or more firms in the network fail to function. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd