SUPPLY CHAIN NETWORK REDESIGN TO MAKE A RESILIENT SUPPLY CHAIN BY ESTABLISHING ALLIANCE STRATEGY

A resilient supply chain network design is a strategic issue in the field of supply chain management. Nonetheless, designing resilient supply chain has been considered for designing new supply chains in previous research studies, and making resiliency in an existing supply chain has not been investigated. In the current research, redesigning a supply chain to make a resilient supply chain has been studied with the possibility of opening new facilities and closing and resizing the existing facilities. This supply chain consists of a set of manufacturers, existing and potential distribution centers, and existing and potential retailers and customers. Distribution centers and retailers may be redesigned in this chain. For this problem, a mixed-integer linear programming model has been developed. Two existing and most applied strategies consisting of extra capacity and the emergency stock, along with a new disruption risk mitigation strategy, named establishing alliance strategy, have been investigated in various disruption scenarios. Establishing alliance has been applied in two parts of the supply chain including manufacturers and retailers. Computational experiments were conducted to assess the performance of the resilient model and make a comparison between the disruption risk mitigation strategies. The results revealed that the supply capability of the resilient model was 13% higher than that of the non-resilient one. Furthermore, resilient supply chain enjoys 9% better performance than non-resilient supply chain in terms of profit. In addition, ``establishing alliance'' strategy has greater impact on the supply capability enhancement compared to ``extra capacity'' and ``emergency stock'' strategies. Also, establishing alliance between manufacturers in comparison with alliance between retailers has greater impact on the performance of the supply chain in terms of both supply quantity and profit. Through the formation of an alliance among manufacturers, the supply quantity and profit of the supply chain will increase by 6.7% and 5.5% respectively, while establishing an alliance in retailers improves supply capability and profit by 3.5% and 1.6% respectively.