Improving decisions support for operational disruption management in freight transport

Journal article, 2020

In this study, the operational management of disruptions is investigated in transport chains with a focus on phases after disruptions have occurred. Instead of focusing on strategies mitigating risk before disruption occurs this paper considers the recovery phase of a disruption at operational level. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights for operational disruption management to achieve improved decision support for the recovery phase. A qualitative method of a case study is used in this paper for the transport around a distribution centre at a FMCG company in Sweden with data collected from semi-structured interviews and observations. The analysis of the findings proposes different types of detection in the recovery phase, which give insights for how to perform early recovery actions. The study contributes to disruption management in transport chains through insights on how to achieve early recovery actions by combining the different detection types with the phases of prediction and action. Instead of focusing on strategies mitigating risk before disruption occurs this paper considers the recovery phase of a disruption at operational level. This is shown to be important to understand reactive or proactive actions in the recovery phase. Transport managers can use the proposed detection types in this paper to detect disruptions in order to respond to disruptions earlier instead of developing competences of fire-fighting for occurred impacts.