Designing Resilience into Service Supply Chains: A Conceptual Methodology

Abstract

This chapter presents a methodology for designing resilient service supply chains. The approach combines system design methods with methods from risk assessment. Service supply chains consist of multiple assets, cooperating to fulfill an operation. Each asset has functionality to perform a set of tasks in the operation, and the combined functionalities of the fleet of assets must cover the activities the service supply chain are to perform. When a module in one asset in the fleet experiences loss of functionality, it constitutes a disruption in the service supply chain, a failure mode. The objective of the proposed methodology is to give decision support reducing the vulnerabilities of the service supply chain through design actions that can increase overall service supply chain resilience. The methodology consists of four steps. The first step includes breakdown of operation and service supply chain, mapping of modules to tasks, and selection of service supply chain configuration based on costs and utility. In the second step, failure modes are identified and their criticality assessed. In the third step, we propose design changes to reduce the impact of disruptions. These are evaluated in Step 4, where decisions regarding redesign are made. The recommendations from this methodology can be used to plan for how to redesign in the case of contingencies, or be used as part of an iterative process where the new information is incorporated in the evaluation of initial service supply chain design.