Innovative maritime logistics in achieving higher flexibility and resilience : a two-stage QFD approach to improve maritime supply chain resilience

• Main Author: Bai, Xiwen
• Other Authors: Lam Siu Lee
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Maritime studies
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62038
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Being international and involving numerous organizations as the very basic nature, maritime supply chains are exposed to various natural and man-made risks. The current increasing interdependency between organizations, coupled with fierce market competition and growing requirements from shippers, has made modern maritime supply chains more vulnerable and augmented the potential effects of disruptions to be proliferated throughout the supply chains. Thus, the concept of resilient supply chain comes into place. This paper provides an original approach to prioritize resilience measures for shipping lines using the quality function deployment (QFD) method from a supply chain perspective, taking both customer requirements and maritime risks into consideration. In this paper, the basic concepts of the QFD model are presented first, and the House of Quality (HoQ) method is then elaborated as a practical procedure for solving the ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions in the QFD model. A review of current literatures on maritime logistics performance, supply chain risks and supply chain resilience gives a rounded understanding of the field and provides the basis for constructing the list of customer requirements, maritime risk factors and resilience measures to formulate the HoQ. Subsequently, we propose the two-stage QFD approach to investigate the relationship between different variables. Specifically, we suggest exploiting HoQ to first relate customer requirements to maritime risks that would have a direct impact on the achievement of the customer requirements, then maritime risks, in turn, to resilience measures to mitigate risks. The empirical part of the research is carried out through data collection during interviews with shipping lines. Resilience measures are prioritized through the QFD model accordingly. The key findings include: (1) Risks associated with the IT system, operational risks and human resource management risks are deemed the most influential. (2) The top three resilience measures are contingency plan, monitoring and maintenance, and supply chain relationship management. The study also unveils the relatively low visibility and integraton in maritime supply chains. Shipping lines tend to focus on operations within the organization, rather than taking the supply chain as a whole. It is recommended that more supply chain integration initiatives should be taken by different parties. As a whole, the QFD model serves as a comprehensive and innovative approach by linking customer requirements, maritime risk factors and resilience measures together. This study also provides practical contribution for organizations to implement a flexible and resilient maritime supply chain. As a result, these organizations would have a better capability to bounce back quickly after disruptions happened on any part along the supply chain.