When is the supply chain resilient? Customer and operational perspectives

Disruptions can adversely impact supply chain resilience, and measurement of these impacts is a challenging problem in research and practice. Using a practical set of resilience indicators characterising preparedness, recovery, network, and process areas, we analyse how different indicators can support analysis and decision-making from customer and operational perspectives of resilience. Disruptions and performance impacts are modelled with the help of discrete-event simulation in anyLogistix supply chain analytics software. For simulation, we construct three distinct network designs and analyse their resilience using three indicators: on-time delivery (OTD), fill rate (FR), and time-to-recover (TTR). We derive some useful theoretical and practical insights. OTD is a suitable indicator of a customer resilience perspective. However, there may be delays in reporting disruptions in the supply chain using OTD. FR can immediately alert users about interruptions in material flows and so it is better suited to the operational resilience perspective. Moreover, we propose a new interpretation of the TTR indicator by considering it from the customer resilience perspective. We reveal the role of OTD and FR as disruption indicators when measuring TTR and provide associated managerial insights. Our study can be helpful for development of multi-stakeholder-oriented resilience performance assessment systems.