Risk management in the modern retail supply chain: Lessons from a case study and literature review

Abstract

In today's increasingly risky and uncertain business and industrial environments, supply chains need to be more flexible and more robust to improve their performance. During the last decade supply chain risk management has emerged as a challenge on the strategic and operational supply chain issues. A deeply analysis of a case study has revealed that modern retail industry needs decision support tools to manage supply chain risks. These tools should cope with emerging practices and integrate many categories of risks. Of course, it has to be understood that risks can differ from one sector to another and from one supply chain to another and one country to another. In this paper we present preliminary research concepts and findings concerning the identification, the analysis and the modeling of risks in the modern retail supply chains. We propose a new framework for categorizing the risks in order to assess the overall impact on the performance of the retail supply chain. These risks were selected based on the literature review and on a case study of a leading retail company in Tunisia. Review of the literature on supply chain risk modeling techniques are presented and discussed. The paper concludes with numerical analysis of supply risk and comments on opportunities for further research on the area of supply chain risk and performance trade-off.