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Towards resilient supply chain networks

In the past decade, events like 9/11 terror attacks, the recent financial crisis and other major crisis has proved that there is strong interaction and interdependency of a supply chain network with its external environments in various channels and thus a need to focus on building resiliency (in short, the ability of the system to recover from damage or disruption) of the entire network system. Although literature has discussed some way of improving resiliency of an individual firm which is a member of the network system, it lacked to capture a holistic view of the supply chain network. Pertaining to this observation, this work proposes to improve resiliency of a supply chain network from a systems perspective rather concentrate on an individual firm. For this purpose, this thesis proposes a conceptual framework to promote early identification and timely information of the disruptions arising in a supply chain network and timely sharing of this information among all the members of the network. The key principle emphasized in this thesis is that recovery from an inevitable disruption has a better possibility if a member of the supply chain network has an early indication or knowledge of the upcoming disruption. A discrete event dynamic system simulation tool called Petri nets is utilized to realize the proposed conceptual framework. Furthermore, the practical benefits and implications of the proposed model and tool are demonstrated with help of two case studies.
This thesis has several contributions to the field of operation management and supply chain. First, a new paradigm for supply chain management to avoid large scale failures such as financial crisis is available to the field, which may be applied by governments or regulatory bodies. Second, a new framework which allows for a quantitative analysis of failures of an entire supply chain network is available to the field, which is easy to be used. Third, a novel application of Petri nets to this new problem in supply chain management is available.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:USASK/oai:usask.ca:etd-09142010-032748
Date20 September 2010
CreatorsMuddada, Raja Ram Mohan Roy
ContributorsZhang, C., Wu, F. X., Burton, R. T., Gokaraju, R.
PublisherUniversity of Saskatchewan
Source SetsUniversity of Saskatchewan Library
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-09142010-032748/
Rightsrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Saskatchewan or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

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