Title: Measuring the severity of a disturbance/disruption in a supply chain: a new quantitative definition, measure, and illustrations

Authors: Kannan Nilakantan

Addresses: Mathematical Modelling Group, IMT – Nagpur, 35th Milestone, Katol Road, Nagpur, 440013, India

Abstract: An important factor affecting the performance of a supply chain (SC) is the severity of the disturbance to the chain. The performance measures of the chain could be expected to be adversely affected by an increase in the severity of the disturbance to the system, while a system with a less severe disturbance could be expected to show better performance under the same set of circumstances. And thereby the severity of the disturbance becomes a quantity of fundamental interest in measuring SC performance. To this end, this paper proposes a substantially new quantitative definition and measure of the severity of a disruption or disturbance to a SC, through the dynamic modelling framework. The measure is then illustrated for various types of disturbances. The measure proposed herein could be expected to be of a fundamental nature, and of significance in studying the responsiveness, resilience, and operational performance analysis of SCs.

Keywords: disruption; disturbance to a supply chain; severity of a disturbance; quantitative measure; quantitative definition.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSCOR.2022.123877

International Journal of Supply Chain and Operations Resilience, 2022 Vol.5 No.2, pp.99 - 127

Accepted: 21 Jul 2021
Published online: 04 Jul 2022 *