Supply chain risk management: creating an agenda for future research

Supply chains are becoming globalised and resulting complex interaction between supply chain actors and increasing interdependency between supply chain risks pose a real challenge in modelling and managing these risks. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive review of literature in the field of ‘supply chain risk management’ and identify important research gaps for future research. We have adopted the method of ‘systematic literature review’ using text mining software and examined peer-reviewed articles published over a period of last 15 years (2000–2014). Keeping in view the interdependent nature of interaction between supply chain risks, there is an urgent need of developing taxonomy of risks representing causal chains of risk sources, risk events and consequences instead of relying on the existing conventional classifications that assign risks to independent categories. Existing techniques have either considered risks as independent factors or focused on solving specific problems resulting in unrealistic and sub-optimal solutions respectively. We propose a new risk management framework that can help researchers model interdependency between supply chain risks and enable practitioners visualise dynamic and holistic interaction between these risks across multiple facets of a supply network.