Dr. Robert Handfield Receives Emerald Citation Award for Supply Chain Research
A research paper that discusses supply chain risk management – co-authored by Dr. Robert Handfield, supply chain management professor at the North Carolina State University Poole College of Management – received a prestigious Emerald Citation of Excellence award at the Academy of Management’s annual meeting in San Antonio in August 2011.
The award designates the research article as one of the top 50 articles from the 300 top management publications worldwide that have had a proven impact since they were published in 2007. The article is titled, “The severity of supply chain disruptions: design characteristics and mitigation capabilities,” and is available at the Emerald Management Review.
Handfield and his colleagues reviewed literature published from 2000 to 2006, dealing with supply chain disruptions, consequence and management, to identify how and why one supply chain disruption would be more severe than another. This topic has proven to be a big issue regarding the BP oil spill and the tsunami in Japan, Handfield said.
“Supply chain disruptions and the associated operational and financial risks represent the most pressing concern facing firms that compete in today’s global marketplace,” the authors state in their paper. Such disruptions are unavoidable, which in turn makes all supply chains risky. Based on their comprehensive research, the researchers offer six propositions that relate the severity of supply chain disruptions to three supply chain characteristics – density, complexity and node criticality – as well as two supply chain mitigation capabilities – recovery and warning.
Handfield is Bank of America University Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management and co-director of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative in Poole College. His co-authors on this paper are Dr. Christopher W. Craighead at Auburn University’s Department of Management; Dr. Jennifer Blackhurst, at the Iowa State University College of Business’s Department of Logistics, Operations and Management Information Systems; and Dr. M. Johnny Rungtusanatham at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.
Their findings augment existing knowledge related to supply chain risk, vulnerability, resilience, and business continuity planning and also call into question the wisdom of pursuing such practices as supply base reduction, global sourcing, and sourcing from supply clusters.
The authors cite the negative impact of the 2002 longshoreman union strike at the U.S. West Coast port and a lightning bolt strike in 2000 at a Phillips semiconductor plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That lightening strike caused a fire that resulted in the contamination of millions of computer chips. Both incidents significantly impacted supply chains for companies that were anticipating deliveries from the affected facilities.
Such disruptions are more than a matter of inconvenience; they can significantly and negatively impact the financial bottom line for companies and other entities in the supply chain. As a result, there has been an increased interest regarding supply chain disruptions and related issues.
