The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage

  • 6h 7m
  • Yossi Sheffi
  • The MIT Press
  • 2005

What happens to a company when the unimaginable occurs? When an earthquake hits its primary contract manufacturer? When labor strikes shut down an entire port? When terrorists cripple a transportation system?

Yossi Sheffi, Professor of Engineering at MIT and Director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, argues that a company’s survival and prosperity depend more on what it does before such a disruption occurs than on the actions it takes as the event unfolds. In The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage, Sheffi explores high-impact/ low-probability disruptions, focusing not only on security but on corporate resilience—the ability to bounce back from such disruptions—and how resilience investments can be turned into competitive advantage.

Sheffi provides tools for companies to reduce the vulnerability of the supply chain they live in. And along the way he tells the stories of dozens of enterprises, large and small, including Toyota, General Motors, UPS, Intel, Amazon.com, the US Navy, and others from across the globe. Their successes, failures, preparations, and methods provide a rich set of lessons in preparing for and managing disruptions.

About the Author

Yossi Sheffi, an international expert in supply chain management, is Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT and Director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. He has worked with leading manufacturers around the world on logistics issues and is active entrepreneur, having founded or cofounded five successful companies since 1987.

In this Book

  • The Resilient Enterprise—Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage
  • Big Lessons from Small Disruptions
  • Understanding Vulnerability
  • Anticipating Disruptions and Assessing Their Likelihood
  • Effects of Disruptions
  • Basic Supply Chain Management
  • Demand-Responsive Supply Chains
  • Reducing the Likelihood of Intentional Disruptions
  • Collaboration for Security
  • Detecting Disruptions
  • Resilience through Redundancy
  • Flexibility through Interchangeability
  • Postponement for Flexibility
  • Strategies for Flexible Supply
  • Customer Relations Management
  • Building a Culture of Flexibility
  • Moving Ahead
  • Notes
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