Development of effective strategies for global supply chain risk management

The continual extension of global supply chains across the world has enabled corporations to spread out their scarce resources more cost-effectively. Through product diversification and variations in production methods, industries have progressively geared towards fulfilling customer needs along the supply chain. However, unknown-unknown events such as natural disasters pose a silent and inevitable danger to global supply chains. The project focuses on the investigations of potential risks that natural disasters impose on global supply chains and measuring the effectiveness of how companies engineer their risk management strategies to cope with this inevitable risk. The project will look into the effectiveness of risk mitigation strategies that companies have adopted in response to the Thailand floods. Many corporations took proactive measures, started to monitor risks, planned for proper risk mitigation strategies, and monitored their progress in implementing these strategies. A case study on Western Digital’s inventory management and its supply chain structure is analyzed to measure its efficiency in its risk mitigation strategies in response to the Thailand floods. To validate the efficiency of Western Digital’s supply chain structure in response to the Thailand floods, a basic, scaled down simulation model was created to compare the throughput, inventory levels, cycle times, number of backorders and production delays for two supply chain structures, before and after the disaster. The result obtained from this study is used in suggesting methods of improvement and mitigation strategies of uncontrollable risks to enhance the efficiency of global supply chains.Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering