Supply chain resilience in electronic components supply chain

Abstract

The strong dispersion of supply chains has made it possible for companies to conduct efficient business operations around the globe, but at the same time, it has made them particularly fragile to grave vulnerability factors, such as pandemics, war and other crises. Especially in the supply chains of electronic components, the proliferation of technologies, improved availability and reduced prices have enabled the rapid development of products for various industrial operators at an accelerating pace, but the possibility of different disruptions has increased at least at the same rate, which impose the supply chains of industrial companies, and especially the resilience, to a hard test. Thus, the extant literature suggests that corporate delivery systems need to be able to avoid disruptions, survive, adapt and, at best, be able to grow business operations after disruptions to achieve a high level of supply chain resilience. The goal of this study was first to evaluate the current state of case company’s supply chain resilience and thus investigate a model of supply chain resilience measurement and how resilience can be first assessed and then developed through use of such models. This study presented a framework and supply chain resilience assessment and management tool (SCRAM™) which evaluates the supply chain resilience through comparison of 7 vulnerability and 13 capability elements and their relative importance to each other. The framework and assessment tool found was then used to evaluate the resilience of the case company’s electronic components supply chain and its most relative suppliers trough use of Likert Scale data. After the analysis and assessment, another goal was to produce resilience-enhancing recommendations for the case company to be implemented. Thus, this thesis was executed as a case study in cooperation with a Finnish industrial company. A systematic literature review was conducted to gather data of supply chain resilience and possibilities for its quantitative evaluation. The empirical data was gathered using internal and external questionnaire surveys conducted for various supply chain professionals. In this study, the most important empirical findings unveiled that Connectivity, External Pressures and Turbulence elements are biggest vulnerabilities to case company’s supply chain operations. In addition, the study thus unveiled that to be able to overcome the risk of exposure to these vulnerabilities and to increase the supply chain resilience, case company needs to make significant investments in Collaboration and Flexibility capabilities. Better execution of forecasting and contingency planning along with efficient information exchange and deeper joint actions with supplier are key factors suggested for case company’s resilience enhancement. This study also reveals perspective for supplier companies to improve their own resilience as part of the case company's supply chain. Although, the implementation of resilience recommendations and the re-evaluation were not in the scope of this study, the insights of the current state of supply chain resilience are believed to be useful for developing the operations of the electronic component supply chains. Furthermore, this study confirmed the usability of the selected framework as tool for supply chain resilience quantitative measure and offers insights for future supply chain resilience assessment and future deployment of measurement tools.