New Operating Environment The Supply Chain Management...

New operating environment bought awareness to the supply chain management after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. These events exposed the pre-existing and unseen risk of disruption to supply networks from terrorist attacks. The risk was there all along but the attacks made it real and foremost in our minds. Additionally, these events began to expose the more significant interdependence that exists between all firms in the supply network. The interdependence also includes reliance on those U.S. Government agencies involved with transportation infrastructure and inbound mterial flows. Given these interdependencies, if one firm fails in the supply network, the entire network†¦show more content†¦Specifically, firms will need to pioneer new relationships with U.S. Government agencies that now share responsibility for making the supply network secure and resilient. Additionally, firms will need to develop deeper relationships with suppliers and customers throughout their supply networks to co-create a more secure and resilient network. Internally, the largest organizational challenge may be in establishing at the individual level a solid understanding of the interdependence of the systems, and the educational and training systems needed for tough network designs and planned resp onses to disruptions. Studying the practices of the progressive firms helped surface several characteristics that were common among the group and which are worth examining. They nearly all of the progressive firms (all but one firm) had previously experienced the impact of disruptions in their supply networks, and in response they built resilience and security into the current supply network. Also these firms revisited their existing supply network design, and actively redesigned their supply networks for resilience through a combination of flexibility and redundancy initiatives. Often, the firms elected to apply these in a ‘layered’ fashion to create a system comprised of layers of security and resilience. Then in developing plans to respond, the progressive firms often focused on ‘failure modes’ and those limited number of ways that operations can be affected by the