Organizing Practices to Combat Supply Chain Security Breaches

Supply chain security (SCS) breaches are torturing supply chains and they have the potential to inflict acute pain on society at large. To cope with such breaches, international bodies, nations, societies, industries, and leading firms have instituted several countermeasures in the form of standards and respective practices. Identifying SCS practices suitable to a firm's specific needs from a laundry list of practices is a difficult task. Relying on the risk management literature and interactions with professionals, we categorize SCS management practices into four classes based on their intent-detection, prevention, response, and mitigation. We consider here their differences and their complementary effects. Our classification can be used to diagnose a firm's supply chain security status. Managers can benchmark their company against their peers using this classification. Equipped with such knowledge, managers, and organizations can ascertain specific gaps and undertake a targeted approach to bridge those gaps. Our results suggest that security-oriented practices have differential effects on SCS performance. We also found that firms who deploy practices in a more integrated approach realize better SCS performance. Thus, firms are advised to adopt the practices as a system to take advantage of the reinforcing characteristics of these practices on each other. © 1973-2011 IEEE.