| Summary: | Companies that manufacture customized resource-intensive products have structural weaknesses in their supply chain design: the engineer-to-order production model, single sourcing of components, and long transportation times. In this context, supply chain resilience requires more than standardized supply chain planning. This thesis explores how a multinational company in the customized, resource-intensive industry builds its supply-chain resilience through proactive and reactive strategies.
Eight semi-structured interviews with the company’s supply chain professionals were analyzed. The findings revealed that structural vulnerabilities, especially customization and network complexity, amplify disruption risk. To counter this, the company builds proactive strategies, such as dual and geographical sourcing, capacity and inventory buffers, forward-looking risk metrics, and trust-based supplier relationships. When disruption hits, the company activates reactive strategies, namely, order prioritization, critical part substitution, and joint crisis management teams. After reacting, the recovery and continuity phase starts, and possible costs of disruption are settled later. Throughout the thesis, relational governance operates as an enabler, shaping both proactive and reactive strategies.
This thesis contributes to theory by demonstrating how structural vulnerabilities shape resilience strategies in an engineer-to-order context and by framing recovery and continuity as an outcome of reactive resilience.
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