Analysis of the performance of supply chain resilience strategies using a simulation approach (case study: natural stone industry)

Building a resilient supply chain is necessary to manage supply chain disruptions and to continue delivery of products to customers. Hence, investigating supply chain resilience strategies is very important. In today's competitive trade, supply chains are faced with different kinds of disruptions simultaneously. Disruptions may occur in the supplier facilities or in the production facilities. The previous studies surveyed these disruptions separately, but in this paper, we proposed eight combined supply chain resilience strategies. In order to compare the performance of these strategies, discrete event simulation is utilised. The measures of comparing the strategies are: fill rate, total cost, available inventory, on-time deliveries, impact time, total backorders and average response time under short-term and long-term disruptions. Each combined resilience strategy includes one supply-side strategy for responding to supply-side disruptions and one production-side resilience strategy for responding to production-side disruptions. Supply-side resilience strategies are backup supplier and extra inventory. Production-side resilience strategies are redundancy, reserved capacity, reserved inventory and increasing work shifts. Results showed that the backup supplier-redundancy (B-R) and extra inventory-redundancy (E-R) are better strategies rather than others in the natural stone industry.