What am I supposed to do about that? A quest to improve resilience

During the recent course ‘Risk and Resilience in Textile Supply Chains’ my interest for how different companies handles unforeseen events was sparked and I started to look at companies in a new way.  Suddenly I looked at all the problems that can occur and what impact it can have on the different companies, how the weather changes the need and sale of different clothing (as the abundance of winter jackets that I see here in rainy Borås), and when a supplier suddenly shuts down without warning its customers (as when my local yarn store suddenly found itself without its biggest yarn supplier). The problems I have presented are in a sense trivial but they can have a great impact on the store.

Well, above I presented two examples on how a crisis can affect the retailer but it is the same thing further up the chain. As a supplier and manufacturer the main goal is to provide the products you have agreed on to your customer and this is not always as easy as it seems… There are raw material shortages, environmental disasters, change of government regulations, acts of terrorism, launch of new products by competitors etc., and the further you know, the more things you start to worry about. But as you start to worry, you will also have the opportunity to do something about it! By understanding the threats the company is faced with, you can also make decisions to decrease the possibility of crises.

The aim of this report is to look into how one specific Small and Medium-sized Company (SME) can improve its resilience and later on present my findings to the company (that I will keep anonymous unless the representative says something else). In contrast to many others I am not doing an internship but a field study so the layout of my blogposts will be somewhat different. Despite the fact that my work will be a bit theoretical and not provide fun learnings about how it is to work at a textile company I do hope that you will find my blogposts just as exiting and that they will spark an interest for the subject.

Sara Jonsson, TASTE13 (Master programme in textile management with specialisation textile value chain management)