Business Continuity Management for Supply Chains Facing Catastrophic Events

Organizations are increasingly subject to many types of disruptions and catastrophes, with little or no predictability, and with increasing frequency and high impact. In response to these, organizational risk management has been pursued broadly in two different ways. One approach has been to adopt procedures like business continuity management (BCM), enterprise risk management (ERM), and related approaches. On the other hand, operations management and supply chain professionals have focused their efforts on cultivating various types of flexibility, agility, and resilience to cope with increasingly volatile business conditions. The first set of approaches has tended to be more structured, reflected by the emergence of standards like ISO 22301. Currently, there is a critical need to reconcile and synthesize both approaches, which forms the main objective of this article. We first provide a summary of BCM methods, followed by a description of the disparate risk management attempts of supply chain professionals. A framework for business continuity management for supply chain risk management is developed based on the structure provided by ISO 22301, and drawing on the strengths of both approaches.