IFS: Literature Review about Supply Chain Risk Management

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Who would have thought that we will have to cope with a pandemic in the 21^st century? The spread of Covid-19 affects all our lives and there is nothing more to do than following the new rules as good as possible and being patient and hopeful. 

But not only our everyday life is highly affected by the pandemic, especially the economy is suffering these days. Many fashion retailers were required to close their stores and as a result, they were left off with tremendous loss of sales and needed to cut their costs. Unfortunately, this resulted in many fashion retailers cancelling or putting their orders on hold, so that the loss is moving upstream along the supply chain. For example, Bangladesh’s manufacturing fashion industry reported a loss of $6 billion dollars of export revenue, closing down factories and leaving millions of people without jobs and payments. 

Due to the pandemic many of us had to adjust plans for the field study, since internships were cancelled, and new rules force us to leave our homes as little as possible. However, this novel situation also inspired me for the topic of my Individually Designed Field Study (IFS). I am going to write a systematic literature review on Risk Management in the Textile Supply Chain. 

I want to investigate the different kinds of risks prevalent in the Textile Supply Chain and strategies and methods in Risk management to cope with these risks. Although it would be highly interested to focus on macro risks as the pandemic, I think that this topic is too novel and too narrow as that research would give sufficient answers yet. However, I am planning to use this literature review as a foundation for the upcoming master thesis to see what fashion retailers learned from the pandemic in terms of Supply Chain Risk Management.

Based on the guidelines proposed in an article I read, I divided my research into four different phases and today I completed the 1^st phase, which involved designing my research, particularly the search strategy. I defined keywords, relevant databased and including and excluding criteria. These decisions are crucial for the quality and scope of the research; thus, I started with researching Supply Chain Risk Management overall to gather an overview and some basic knowledge about it. Additionally, I asked for some advice from some who have more experience in this field. As a result, I decided to narrow the time frame down, focusing on research between 2015 to 2020 in order to identify Risk Management in the era of the digitalization. It will be interesting to see if new technologies simplified handling risks, even though these days it feels like that it is not possible to prepare for such an event as a pandemic.

Next week the 2^nd phase will begin, which means conducting the search. This will show if my previous made decisions will lead to finding sufficient articles and answer my research question. So, hopefully I will report positive results in the next blog entry. 

Stay safe and healthy, everyone!