Creating Resilience and Integration with Cross-Functional Supply Chain Planning

Licentiate thesis, 2024

Incidents of supply chain disruptions have been a worrying occurrence for organizations. Resilience is required in organizations to recover from these disruptions. There are various resilience models that have been developed that highlight the capabilities required to achieve resilience. The four main capabilities highlighted in the literature are agility, flexibility, redundancy, and collaboration. Among these, collaboration or integration is an important capability required within the organization and across the supply chain. Integration can be developed around a process, and cross-functional supply chain planning (SCP) is a group of such processes that can develop integration. The purpose of this thesis is to understand how integration and resilience are created in organizations through cross-functional SCP.

To approach this purpose, the thesis relies on literature on supply chain resilience, SCP, and process integration in relation to SCP. A multiple case study was carried out to study integration and resilience. The sales and operations planning (S&OP) process was studied to understand integration within organizations. To study resilience, the various SCP processes used by organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic and semi-conductor disruptions were studied. The thesis builds on multiple sources of data, including semi-structured interviews, documents, and workshops together with case companies.

The findings indicate that integration can take various forms, depending on the context of the organization. Coordination is important across all cases to exchange information between the various functions. Improving collaboration and alignment results in higher levels of integration. But the level of integration required depends on the context. However, response to disruption is dependent on integration within the organization and across the supply chain. The organization changes its SCP processes to adapt to the context. Here, the sales and operations execution (S&OE) process is used to mitigate disruption, while S&OP is used as guidance for S&OE. Ad-hoc processes and teams are also created during a disruption. Top management plays an important role in reorganizing the SCP. People based capabilities like collaboration, knowledge management, decision making are also required. The processes were coordinated through intra-process formalization, informal communication, top management involvement, and strategic alignment. The processes interact with each other to generate flexibility and agility while relying on organization knowledge, assets, and coordination with customers and suppliers. After the disruption, many processes were retained for information sharing. Based on the findings, a model of SCP integration and resilience is proposed.

This thesis is one of the few studies examining the role of demand and supply planning conducted in supply chain planning processes in improving resilience in organizations. By proposing the necessary resources for creating resilience, a model for a combination of resources is created.

This study focuses on large manufacturing organizations within Sweden. Organizations in other countries with different business models, cultures, and supply chains could experience different outcomes from disruptions and require different resources to manage the disruption. More case studies are needed to reveal how resilience and integration can contribute to resilience in various ways.