Risk and Supply Chain Management – A Research Agenda

After a long break from reviewing actual supply chain risk literature, today I would like to return to the main thrust of this blog, namely supply chain risk. Today’s article, Risk and Supply Chain Management – Creating a Research Agenda, by Omera Khan, Bernard Burnes and Martin Christopher, was published in 2007 and provides and excellent, broad, and in-depth review of the literature on supply chain risk and locates this literature within the general literature on risk. The article concludes with the outline for a research agenda aimed at how supply chain risk can be fully understood and managed. Albeit exploratory and conceptual in its approach, the article provides valuable insights into the current literature.

A good starting point

The authors themselves state that the article is a literature review, and indeed, their reference list boasts 95 references, articles and books, spanning anything from supply chain risk to risk and supply chain management.The article is thus a good starting point for anyone researching supply chain risk.

Key questions

The key questions the article seeks to answer are:

1. What is risk and risk management?
2. Is risk and important issue in supply chain management?
3. What approaches are available for managing supply chain risk?

Putting together many different views and perspectives, the article highlights that risk and supply chain risk is a highly debated and not easily unified concept, since it involves both quantitative and qualitative approaches.

The need for a research agenda

What the authors find in their review is that while the study of risk and risk management have a long history, and while organizational and financial risk are topics that are well researched and understood, supply chain risk management is still in its infancy. Two shortcomings stand out in particular:

The literature on purchasing and risk, and supply chain management and risk, fails to draw on or locate itself within the wider theory of risk and the practice of risk mangement.

Though the general literature on risk offers a wide range of tools and techniques for managing risk, these do not appear to have been adapted for use in managing supply chain risk. Rather, what appears to be on offer is a range of general prescriptions on how to reduce risk.

In essence, much of the supply chain risk literature does not connect itself to the risk literature, which offers  a wide range empirically founded research.

Consequently, the authors suggest that if supply chain is to be studied beyond generalizations, a three-fold research agenda is needed:

1. There is a need to ground research into supply supply risk within the broader study of risk in general.
   a) How can other research on risk help the understanding of risk in the supply chain?
   b) How can other key concepts of risk and risk management be incorporated into the supply chain?
   c) How can the debate regarding the subjective-objective nature of risk help in the development of tools and frameworks for supply chain risk management?
2. There is a need for broad and in-depth empirical research into how risk is managed in supply chains.
   a) How do companies manage supply chain risk?
   b) What processes and techniques do companies use to identify and analyze risk in their supply chains?
   c) How do companies benchmark their supply chain risk against that of their competitors’?
   d) How do companies evaluate their supply chain risk profile and develop risk contingencies?
3. There is a need to devise a robust and well-grounded models of supply chain risk management, which incorporate risk management tools and techniques from other disciplines of research.

Conclusion

I haven’t seen any follow-up articles on this topic, neither by these authors, nor by other authors…yet, but I could be wrong. Given that this article is fairly recent, any follow-ups would most likely still be in press or still be in writing. Personally, I do believe that supply chain risk is an under-researched area that needs further exploration and linkages to other fields of research. It will be interesting to see if others think the same.

Reference

Khan, O., & Burnes, B. (2007). Risk and supply chain management: creating a research agenda The International Journal of Logistics Management, 18 (2), 197-216 DOI: 10.1108/09574090710816931

Links

• martin-christopher.info: Martin Christopher‘s home page
• manchester.ac.uk: Bernard Burnes‘ homepage
• linkedin.com: Omera Khan