Building Resilience: Aligning supply chain reconfiguration and dynamic planning (ReAl)

This project combines knowledge and experience from five leading Swedish manufacturers and research competence of RISE and Chalmers to build-up a sustainable and resource-efficient supply chain resilience capability. The overall purpose is to accelerate the build-up of resilient and resource-effective value chains in Swedish manufacturing industry by developing and integrating strategies and working methods of supply chain design and supply chain planning into a hyper-responsive and sustainable production system.

The issue: Swedish manufacturing companies have recently experienced a series of disruptive events with direct, major, unpredicted, and damaging impact on their operations, supplier base and customer markets.

What is needed? The immediateness, variety and unprotectedness of recent disruptions has materialised into true “unknown-unknowns”. Manufacturers have responded in a learn-as-you-execute manner, prioritizing timely delivery and adequate quality and quantity, with less focus on costs and environmental goals. Well-established principles of supply chain planning and supply chain structures have been challenged as we experience the disruptions unfolding. Sustaining supply from suppliers and to customers is a core task.

Learnings from current experience have identified three key needs:

• Ability to raise more fundamental questions in assessing the vulnerability of current approaches to supply chain planning and supply chain design practices.
• Ability to create a better fit between a specific type of disruption and response.
• Given the complexity and unpredictability of disruptions and/or their impact and how they tie into both the supplier and customer end of the organisation, an ability to create new types of responses.

Approach: Focus on two perspectives of practice, which during the current crisis have been seen as the champions of supply chain resilience in their organisations: supply chain planning and sourcing strategies concerning supply chain design.

The combination of co-creation and comparative studies with single-loop and doubleloop learning cycles within each work package allows for comprehensive coverage of contemporary issues that need immediate intervention. This enhances the transferability of outcome across organisations already during the project period into specific impact (individual learning, organisational development), which in turn also strengthens the rigor of the approach in terms of generalisability of the results.

SMEs are included in separate tasks of three WPs. TRL level 5 is reached in the design-oriented WPs 3-4 and TRL 6 in the prototyping, field-testing in individual companies as testbeds, and transition studies of WP 5.

The deliverables and achievements:

• Strong collaborative learning platform between leading manufacturers.
• A dynamic and flexible mindset created through a cross-company/university collaboration.
• A tool for supply chain managers to trade-off requirements from resilience to disruptions with effectiveness and sustainability goals (SDG #8, 12, 13) by conducting vulnerability mapping of current practice.
• Roadmap of new types of responses, considering the contingencies of the individual company. The effect generated will be a more re-configurable supply chain structure and integrated and new ways for dynamic supply chain planning.
• A framework guiding managers to deliver the desired results by quickly adopting a structural configuration in their supply chain design and supply chain planning to create a better “fit” between type of response and the disruptive event.
• Field-tested new supply chain planning interventions contribute to robust business cases on resiliency and production flexibility that enhance the sustainability goals of the company.
• Specific SME extracting and validating in WP 2-4.

Project leader
Patrik Jonsson, Chalmers University of Technology
[email protected]
+46 730346393

Participating organisations
→ Chalmers University of Technology
→ Ericsson
→ Volvo
→ Getinge
→ SKF
→ Mitsubishi Logisnext Europe
→ RISE