Understanding Natural Disasters as Risks in Supply Chain Management through Web Data Analysis

With the increasing trend of global outsourcing, companies are now facing ever more complex supply chains.When a company operates over a large geographical area, the likelihood of disruptions is potentially increased due to such unforeseen events as natural disasters, union strikes or social unrest.In this paper, we consider natural disasters as a form of risks in supply chains and propose to aid its management by analyzing Web data collected in real-time.Using Twitter "tweets" as our primary source of Web data, a real-time data crawler is developed to collect and analyze tweets that are identified as relevant to natural disasters.In addition, a visualization platform customizable to users' requirements is implemented as part of the decision making dashboard for supply chain risk management.The applicability of such a system and its effectiveness for making informed decisions in risk mitigations are then discussed via a case study.