Recent events like the Corona Pandemic and the blockage of the Suez Canal show the susceptibility of supply chains to disruptions. Those disruptions have detrimental impacts on supply chain performance (Hendricks and Singhal, 2005), which urges supply chain managers to increase supply chain resilience (Christopher and Peck, 2004).

In the course of those disruptions a lot of strategies have been deployed ranging from increasing safety-stock, over implementing alternative transportation routes, to sourcing from multiple suppliers. Each of these strategies tackles specific problems in their own way, but all of them come with a flaw with regard to increased dependencies, less flexibility, or higher costs.

The goal of this thesis is to investigate what strategies have been deployed in recent crises and what are the benefits and flaws of these strategies with regard to their ability to increase supply chain resilience. For this, both white (scientific) and grey literature should be conducted. The final goal of this thesis will be to come up with a decision support model to help deciding for one or another strategy in view of possible upcoming crises.

Christopher, M. and Peck, H. (2004) ‘Building the Resilient Supply Chain’, The International Journal of Logistics Management [Preprint]. doi:10.1108/09574090410700275.

Hendricks, K.B. and Singhal, V.R. (2005) ‘Association Between Supply Chain Glitches and Operating Performance’, Management Science, 51(5), pp. 695–711. doi:10.1287/mnsc.1040.0353.

Ivanov, D. (2017) ‘Simulation-based ripple effect modelling in the supply chain’, International Journal of Production Research, 55(7), pp. 2083–2101. doi:10.1080/00207543.2016.1275873.

Li, Y. et al. (2020) ‘Ripple Effect in the Supply Chain Network: Forward and Backward Disruption Propagation, Network Health and Firm Vulnerability’, European Journal of Operational Research [Preprint]. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2020.09.053.