Risk Models and Managerial Strategies for the Global Supply Chain's Security: An Analysis of the Management of International Vulnerabilities and Emergencies

Introduction

In the nowadays society, the importance of global supply chains has experienced a fundamental growth due to the constant increasing flow of physical goods and services. A disruption within any of these flows may lead to far-reaching negative consequences. Therefore, in the last decade, there has been increasing emphasis on managing risk and challenges to improve the overall economic and social security. Following terrorist attacks, for example, firms have been taking multiple steps to ensure safe transit of their goods across international borders. In parallel, natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, epidemics as well as many other unforeseen events such as product contamination, shortages, border closings, made firms more aware of their vulnerability and weaknesses, and encouraged them to seek strategies to reduce those risk, increasing stability and efficiency along their supply chains.

The current pandemic crisis has underlined several limits of the global interconnection experienced in the contemporary era. The outbreak of the Coronavirus disease had a severe impact on the supply chain of companies. Many of them have not been able to take proactive measures to cope with the stagnant distribution of their products and services, and sharp decline in sales, while others are restructuring their operational and organizational dimensions in view of the post-COVID-19 scenario. In a recent survey, Shigeyuki Ishida claimed that supply chain corporations had a significant impact on business continuity planning (BCP) during disasters (Ishida et al., 2016). As a result, the front line of competition should shift to more comprehensive proactive modelling.

Historical data indicate that the total number of natural disasters has dramatically risen over the last ten years (Tang, 2006). According to Thomas and Kopczak (2005), they are even expected to increase another fivefold over the next 50 years, as ascribable to different factors like global warming, population growth rate, urbanization, residential densification, economic and financial global contingencies, natural resources immoderate use and depletion. Due to these reasons, offering timely and necessary aid to those in need through efficient humanitarian supply chains is a major challenge and logistics acts as a strategic role, as expressed by Trunick (2005). Therefore, the field of humanitarian logistics and supply chain management has recently gained much attention in research. Apart from the frequency and impact of disasters, humanitarian organizations are under an increased pressure of improving their logistics performance.

The chapter aims at analysing the learning opportunities, hidden in the collaboration between private and public in relation to disaster relief operations, to facilitate the exchange of skills and experiences with a view to increasing responsiveness, preparation, and security of the global supply chain leveraging risk mitigation strategies. The research explores the elaboration of proactive approaches able to develop tools and action plans to reduce natural risks at the lowest level.

The field of study relies on the logistics dimension as a mean to stabilize the contiguity in the public and private organizations’ strategic planning, reaching a synthesis of the two perspectives through the analysis of a cross-sectors social oriented cooperation. The purpose is to describe an organizational model apt to improve the responsiveness to external environments, developing long-term programs to deal with the increasing of global threats.