"Improving Visibility, Risk Management and Economic Sustainability of Supply Chains"

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Recent changes in business environments like large-scale offshoring, shortening product lifecycles and focus on emerging economies as growth drivers, have significantly impacted the supply chains of North American firms. The most important effects are: i) fragmented supply chains that create incentive asymmetry among the chain partners, ii) an increase in risk from both supply and demand perspectives, and, iii) lack of visibility across the chain that results in information asymmetry among the chain partners. The objective of this research program is to develop normative models that can help managers to better cope with this increased risk and provide end-to-end visibility of supply chains as well as result in improved economic outcomes for the chain partners. In order to do so, we will first address the issue of supply side risk management in the context of product development in regulated industries and for supply chains where tier-1 suppliers outsource to sub-tier suppliers without informing the OEM. Subsequently, we will develop an integrative supply chain framework that incorporates incentive asymmetry, both demand and supply risks and lack of information about both such risks. The goal would be to analyze the framework in order to better understand how chain partners can use different types of strategies to mitigate such risks and asymmetries. While the above two research projects will focus on stylized models, in the third one we intend to study more realistic models of supply chain risk management in two specific contexts: emerging economies and the natural resource sector. These two settings are similar in the sense that both of them suffer from risk and asymmetry issues discussed above. Given that many Canadian companies are aiming to enter emerging markets and Canadian economy is very much dependent on natural resources, both these domains are vital for the Canadian economy. In this phase our objective will be to develop and analyze frameworks that capture their idiosyncrasies. We are confident that the strategic and tactical insights developed from the above two contextual models would help Canadian firms to better compete in the global marketplace.