Proactive planning for catastrophic events in supply chains

Abstract Supply chains are increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic events such as hurricanes or terrorist attacks. This is not only true because firms are more exposed to catastrophes, but also the result of investments made in recent years to operate supply chains with fewer human and capital resources, especially inventory. Consequently, there is today less “slack” available in supply chains to deal with catastrophic events. Thus, proactively planning for these types of events should be a priority for supply chain managers. A catastrophic event has a very low probability of occurrence but has significant consequences if it does occur. The goal of this research is to develop a process to proactively plan for catastrophic risk events through an integration of diverse research streams related to the management of risk. In particular, the proposed process builds upon an existing risk analysis framework by incorporating an innovative methodology used by the insurance industry to quantify the risk of multiple types of catastrophic events on key supply chain locations.