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Supply Chain Resilience in the Telecom Industry

Published 23 Jan 2019
Reference 6394
Topic Operations
Region North America
Length 11 page(s)
Summary

The case discusses supply chain risk management: how to leverage the structure of a supply network to assess its resilience, focusing on the consequences of disruption rather than the causes, as is traditionally done. The proposed framework, presented in a 2014 HBR paper by Simchi-Levi, Schmidt and Wei, describes how a consultant, Ann Van Delft, applies this framework when assessing the supply chain risk for her client a large telco internet service provider. Telco had recently experienced several outages due to equipment malfunctioning and a shortage of spare parts, resulting in the loss of some customers to its competitors. Ann was hired to deal with these issues as senior management felt the outages were damaging Telco’s brand, and would deter new customers.

Teaching objectives

. Apply the framework proposed by Simchi-Levi, Schmidt, and Wei (HBR, 2014) to assess the resilience of a supply network to potential disruptions. . Shift the focus of risk management strategies away from the potential causes of disruption to their consequences. . Improve students’ quantitative skills by generating managerial insight from a large data set.

Keywords
  • Supply chain risk management
  • Time to survive
  • Time to recover
  • Network analysis
  • Quantitative analysis
  • Q21819