Ripple effect in the supply chain: an analysis and recent literature

TLDR

The ripple effect describes how disruptions propagate through supply chains, affecting performance and design, and recent studies have identified key future research directions. This study analyzes the ripple effect, identifies its causes and mitigation strategies, and proposes a control framework incorporating redundancy, flexibility, and resilience. The authors delineate the ripple effect’s features relative to the bullwhip effect, review and classify recent quantitative literature into optimisation, simulation, control theory, and complexity/reliability, and propose a control framework.

Abstract

In this study, the ripple effect in the supply chain is analysed. Ripple effect describes the impact of a disruption propagation on supply chain performance and disruption-based scope of changes in supply chain structural design and planning parameters. We delineate major features of the ripple effect as compared to the bullwhip effect. Subsequently, we review recent quantitative literature that tackled the ripple effect explicitly or implicitly and give our vision of the state of the art and perspectives. The literature is classified into mathematical optimisation, simulation, control theoretic and complexity and reliability research. We observe the reasons and mitigation strategies for the ripple effect in the supply chain and present the ripple effect control framework that includes redundancy, flexibility and resilience analysis. Even though a variety of valuable insights has been developed in the said area in recent years, some crucial research avenues have been identified for the near future.