Building resilient supply chains through supply chain planning advancements. A case study mapping current resilience capabilities

Abstract

The world has recently been struck by many different types of disruptions, affecting the supply chain’s performance, such as a global pandemic. A consensus in business is that changes are needed in some of the current supply chain’s strategies to stay competitive and resilient. Supply chain resilience and the concept of developing a resilient supply chain have thus become a part of many companies’ agendas. The development of capabilities to respond to, or minimize disruptions impact. The thesis has thus focused on developing current supply chain resilience capabilities at the case company Ericsson. This has been done by analyzing past disruption cases, with different types of origin, to investigate the current state of Ericsson’s capabilities. The data was gathered by interviewing involved employees in respective disruption, gathering information about the different activities and strategies applied when mitigating the impact. The case data was then analyzed individually and across the cases. The mitigation actions and strategies were then analyzed and then categorized into the adapted resilience capability framework. Ericsson proved to apply many anticipative and adaptive capabilities during the different disruptions, leaving no significant gap in the framework used. Even though no significant gaps were found in the framework, some areas of improvement were identified. The improvement suggestions are connected to Ericsson’s ability to sense and map their vulnerability, information and data management, disruption processes, and leveraging and structuring post-disruptive feedback sessions.