Innovative maritime logistics in achieving higher flexibility and resilience : a two-stage QFD approach to improve maritime supply chain resilience

Abstract

Today, customer service quality has become increasingly important in supply chain management and maritime supply chain management. To deliver superior customer value, maritime supply chains need to have proper resilience measures to respond to maritime risks that could cause disruptions to supply chains. Although there are studies on risk assessment for maritime supply chains, there are few studies that examine the resilience measures to counter these risks. This paper aims to design a model to identify and prioritize resilience measures for shipping lines from a maritime supply chain perspective.

At the beginning, literature reviews and preliminary interviews with industry players are conducted to investigate the key issues in maritime supply chain – customer demand, risks and resilience. Subsequently, the study proposes a two-stage Quality Function Deployment (QFD) model to identify and assess the effectiveness of resilience measures for shipping lines. The proposed QFD model is a simple and innovative solution for maritime supply chain resilience as

it links customers’ requirements with resilience measures. Using data collected from case studies, the two-stage QFD model is constructed to show the relative importance of customer requirements, risks and resilience measures.

By comparing results obtained from three case studies, some prevailing trends are observed for the container liner industry. Firstly, liner companies tend to focus more on schedule reliability instead of delivery speed. Secondly, supply chain risks and external risks are not seen as important as internal risks such as operational risks. Thirdly, resilience measures relating to supply chain management are not rated as important as measures related to internal

management such as contingency plans and quality control procedures. These results suggest that liner companies do not rely on supply chain management and integration as a means to

improve resilience and competitiveness. To further improve on supply chain resilience and flexibility, liner companies and maritime industry in general need to have more coordination and partnerships with each other to achieve greater supply chain integration.