Investigating the Interrelationships among Vulnerability Factors in Supply Chain: An Analysis with DEMATEL Method in Agri-food Industry

Recent growth in globalization has created complex Supply chains with that greater risks and often vulnerable to unpredictable disturbances. Managers need methods and tools to enable them to quickly understand the vulnerabilities level in their own supply chains and to mitigate them in an efficient manner. The managers' aspiration is to ensure efficient resilient supply chain. To this end, supply chain vulnerabilities need to be effectively evaluated to mitigate the most critical ones. In this paper, a methodology based DEMATEL method is provided for evaluating the importance of vulnerability factors and for constructing the causal relations among the most critical ones to better targeting and implementing the resilience capacities in a concern of efficiency. The results provide managerial insights as to which of the factors are to be given priority for supply chain vulnerabilities mitigation. The proposed approach is illustrated through a real agri-food supply chain case study in Tunisia.