Supply chain resilience : a case study analysis of a supply network in a developing country context
type: CreativeWork
description: In recent years, building Supply Chain Resilience (SCRES) has gained considerable interest as the best way firms can face up to disruptions and gain a competitive advantage. The need for more empirical work on SCRES is well expressed in the literature, but there are few prior empirical studies on SCRES to date; and their focus has been on the developed world, especially Western Europe and North America. Yet, developing countries constitute a significant part of the world population and global supply chains; and there is evidence to believe that developing countries have also faced disastrous effects of supply chain failures. And the current global interconnectedness suggests that such effects can propagate into the developed world. Further, while several potential strategies for improving SCRES have been proposed in the literature, the relationships between them remain ambiguous, with some researchers arguing they are independent and others considering them to be interrelated – meaning they could contradict or reinforce each other, potentially affecting SCRES. This thesis presents findings from the case study of a supply network of 20 manufacturing firms in the developing country of Uganda, to answer the following related questions: what do manufacturing firms in Uganda perceive to be the threats to their supply chains? What strategies do they adopt to build resilience? What are the outcomes of implementing these strategies? The thesis also investigates how the threats and strategies are interrelated, and what it means for SCRES. The findings reveal that the context of a developing country characterised, for example, by weak legal controls and social acceptance of certain customs and practices can produce threats to SCRES like corruption and dishonest employees that are less pronounced in the developed world. It is also found that the threats to SCRES are mainly chronic and endogenous events rather than the exogenous discrete, large-scale catastrophic events typical…
abstract: In recent years, building Supply Chain Resilience (SCRES) has gained considerable interest as the best way firms can face up to disruptions and gain a competitive advantage. The need for more empirical work on SCRES is well expressed in the literature, but there are few prior empirical studies on SCRES to date; and their focus has been on the developed world, especially Western Europe and North America. Yet, developing countries constitute a significant part of the world population and global supply chains; and there is evidence to believe that developing countries have also faced disastrous effects of supply chain failures. And the current global interconnectedness suggests that such effects can propagate into the developed world. Further, while several potential strategies for improving SCRES have been proposed in the literature, the relationships between them remain ambiguous, with some researchers arguing they are independent and others considering them to be interrelated – meaning they could contradict or reinforce each other, potentially affecting SCRES. This thesis presents findings from the case study of a supply network of 20 manufacturing firms in the developing country of Uganda, to answer the following related questions: what do manufacturing firms in Uganda perceive to be the threats to their supply chains? What strategies do they adopt to build resilience? What are the outcomes of implementing these strategies? The thesis also investigates how the threats and strategies are interrelated, and what it means for SCRES. The findings reveal that the context of a developing country characterised, for example, by weak legal controls and social acceptance of certain customs and practices can produce threats to SCRES like corruption and dishonest employees that are less pronounced in the developed world. It is also found that the threats to SCRES are mainly chronic and endogenous events rather than the exogenous discrete, large-scale catastrophic events typical…
author: Tukamuhabwa Rwakira, Benjamin
author: Busby, Jerry
author: Stevenson, Mark
date published: 2015
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:48:27Z
provider: Lancaster University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Lancaster University