The adoption and impact of theoretical supply risk management strategies in practice

Organizations often face a broad range of challenges in successfully managing risks in the upstream supply chain. A comprehensive academic literature base is available on supply chain risk management (SCRM), intended to provide supply chain professionals with strategies and methods on how to best deal with such adverse supply events. The purpose of this study comes forward when considering the pervasiveness of supply risk incidents in practice and the substantial attention supply risk management receives in academic theory. Therefore, the following research question forms the backbone of this study: What are the most important theoretical supply risk management strategies and how do these theoretical supply risk management strategies impact supply risk in practice? By answering this question, this study contributes to filling the gap regarding the availability of empirical investigation on this research topic. To answer this question, this research is conducted along two dimensions. First, relevant academic theory is explored to determine the most important theoretical supply risk management strategies. This exercise results in the development of a conceptual model which is tested via the qualitative examination of supply risk management of fifteen divergent organizations. This case study methodology enables obtaining useful insights into the practical adoption and real-life impact of theoretical supply risk management strategies. Various interesting insights are obtained. The majority of the studied sub strategies is adopted in private sector organizations. Supply risk management in the public sector appears to be immature. Supply base design is more important for production organizations whereas supplier cooperation strategies see slightly larger adoption rates at goods and services providers. Supply chain visibility scores lower, mainly caused by organizations’ reluctance of sharing information. Furthermore, substantial evidence for the enabling role of management support is found as well as poor support for the moderating role of supply chain complexity on the impact of supply risk management strategies. This study forms a valuable reference work for supply chain managers as the results can be used to benchmark organizations’ supply risk management maturity. Furthermore, it enables the comparison of supply risk management practices between organizations differing in terms of industry, size, number of suppliers, level of supply chain integration and managed spend.