Strategic Planning to Alleviate Operational, Financial and Climate Risk in Supply Chain Management

137 pagesThe supply chain is a complex system with the participation of various parties. Due to its complexity , supply chain management not only involves the regular uncertainty from the demand and supply side, but also the specific risks depending on the operational context and the industry. The regular risk has long been studied in the literature. How to use operational strategy to alleviate the unconventional risk remains less explained. In this dissertation, we investigate different sources of supply chain risk: (1) operational risk, (2) financial risk and (3) climate risk.We develop linear programming and dynamic programming models to draw insight of how the firm can proactively prepare for those risks, either under operational constraints, third party intermediary, or government policy restriction. We also conduct numerical studies both using data of the real firm and simulation to validate the conclusion from the mathematical models. The dissertation consists of three main chapters. - Chapter 2: Mitigating Supply Chain Operational Risk Using Part Inventory Portfolios. This is joint work with Professor William Schmidt. - Chapter 3: Mitigating Supply Chain Financial Risk Using Reverse Factoring. This is joint work with Professor Li Chen. - Chapter 4: Mitigating Climate Risk Using Strategic Growing Area Planning in Agricultural Supply Chain. This is joint work with Professor Nagesh Gavirneni. The three chapters are independent but compliment each other. Chapter 2 uses the linear programming model to show how the firm reroutes its production plan upon disruption, and how to proactive change in inventory policy to mitigate the firm's disruption exposure in a cost effective way using company data. Chapter 3 uses the dynamic programming cash management model to study how Reverse Factoring creates value for both a small supplier and a big buyer, and how the liquidity provider designs the optimal term. Chapter 4 builds stylized model to explore how the agricultural firm's fixed investment decision is impacted under yield uncertainty with or without the government restriction on carrying over products. All these chapters commonly focus on different sources of risk in the supply chain. Therefore, this dissertation aims to contribute to strategically alleviating the risk in supply chain management by incorporating specific context of the supply chain