MGT 610 – Operations Management – Week 3

Week 3 – Risk Management and Resilience

We read two papers, one titled “Building Resilient Supply Chains Won’t Be Easy” by Levi and one titled “From Risk to Resilience: Learning to Deal with Disruptions” by Fiksel. We learned about stress testing to identify points of weakness and risk. We also went into supply chain vulnerabilities using SCRAM (Supply Chain Resilience Assessment and Management) Framework. That gave us a deep dive on these vulnerabilities and a better understanding of supply chain’s capabilities as well. We also read Agrawal’s “How Machine Learning Will Transform Supply Chain Management”. I found this interesting and would like to know more, although I suspect if this paper was rewritten today it would focus on AI. Finally, we reviewed the Coronavirus and how that affected supply chains. Living through that was the first time I realized the fragility of our system.

Concepts in the lectures included other risk frameworks like VUCA and MEAT, the latter of which was developed by a mountain expeditionary leader. I find risk management interesting, it puts my tendency to worry and fixate to best use!