Supply chain risk assessment during new product development: a group decision making approach using numeric and linguistic data

Companies strive to minimise supply chain related risks during new product development as any glitch while developing new products can lead to considerable delay in product launch with severe financial implications. However, many organisations face difficulty in properly assessing the vulnerabilities of their globally dispersed supply chains during the product development stage as no suitable procedure for that purpose seems to be readily available in the literature. The present research is an attempt to fulfil this requirement. A step-by-step approach for supply chain risk assessment during new product development, involving group decision making, is suggested. This approach can use both numeric and linguistic data and helps in determining vulnerability scores for various sub-systems and for each supplier of the most vulnerable sub-system. This is followed by failure mode effect analysis (FMEA) which helps prioritise failure modes of vulnerable suppliers and thus create specific control plans to mitigate supply related failures. Using this approach, organisations can devise control plans to alleviate the supplier related risks during new product development. Although, the methodology is illustrated through an application in aircraft manufacturing, it can also be used in other discrete and process manufacturing industries.