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Unit of study_

ITLS6015: Managing Supply Chain Disruption

Supply chains are typically designed to handle minor risks in supply and demand. Increasingly complex supply chains leave businesses vulnerable to abnormal events and disruptions, including natural disasters, supplier failure, cyber security threats and wide scale threats such as pandemics and climate change. Despite this, supply chains are an essential service and play a crucial economic and humanitarian role in times of crises. Supply chains are also undergoing structural change due to evolving consumer demand and are being impacted by disruptive technologies such as manufacturing-as-a-service and autonomous distribution and delivery. Supply chains are differentiated by their resilience to abnormal events and disruptions and their ability to accommodate and exploit structural change and disruptive technologies. This unit explores each of these types of disruption and equips students with a variety of strategies for mitigating these risks. Students design resilient supply chains and plan responses to humanitarian crises. They critically assess the structural changes and technological disruption that are taking place in supply chains now or are anticipated to occur in the future. This unit makes extensive use of recent case studies, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Code ITLS6015
Academic unit Transport and Logistics Studies
Credit points 6
Prerequisites:
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None
Corequisites:
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None
Prohibitions:
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None

At the completion of this unit, you should be able to:

  • LO1. Appraise existing supply chains for their vulnerability to disruption
  • LO2. Prioritise regular verses risk mitigation supply chain decisions and investments
  • LO3. Identify technologies and structural changes that are disrupting supply chains and protect against these and create business opportunities from them
  • LO4. Design supply chains that are resilient to regular and abnormal risks and disruptions
  • LO5. Evaluate the ethical implications of business responses to supply chain disruption
  • LO6. Integrate multi-disciplinary perspectives within diverse teams to effectively manage supply change disruption