Crisis Management Practices and Approaches: Insights from Major Supply Chain Crises

Recent market trends, such as outsourcing and globalization, have made supply chains more exposed to disruptive external incidents, such as catastrophic man made events and natural disasters. Globalization favors the expansion of the supply chain across national borders; a fact that can transform even much smaller incidents to organizational crises (Manuj & Mentzer, 2008). More and more, stakeholders are being implicated in contemporary supply chains and when a crisis occurs it has to be faced timely, otherwise the consequences can get out of proportions (Randall & Farris, 2009). Lately, organizations try to make proactive planning to enhance decision making in the time of a crisis, but still no specific guidelines, either from literature or practitioners, exist about supply chain crisis management (Hittle & Leonard, 2011). In this paper, we try to identify specific processes and practices that make enterprises successfully confront supply chain crises or drive them to failure by studying major crises incidents as reported in the literature. In doing so, indicative case studies are studied and the business practices are examined, analyzed and discussed.