Industries and disasters: building robust and competitive supply chains

In: Safety and risk in society

Abstract

The purpose of this book is to explore the ways that industries, under the pressures of global competition, balance sustained industrial competitiveness and robustness against major disasters. The book focuses mainly on the impact of disasters on supply chains for manufactured (mainly tradable) goods. A special feature of this particular theme is that companies have to deal with not only disasters that may come someday, but also global competition that industrial sites have to face every day. If, for example, companies add excessive amounts of inventory to their manufacturing sites for fear of the next major earthquake, they may not survive long enough to see the next earthquake due to their loss of global competitiveness. Thus, on a practical side, this book proposes that companies can balance global competitiveness and the anti-disaster robustness of industrial sites, rather than simply choosing one or the other, if they organize their efforts under the principles of continuous improvement (kaizen) and lean production--