Roy Andersson new Associate Professor

On Thursday 17 December, Roy Andersson will hold his docent lecture about the strategies of successful resilient businesses and organizations.

"The length and complexity of the supply chain tend to increase, rather than diminish, thereby making the supply chain riskier and less predictable and, hence, more vulnerable. At the same time, customers are becoming increasingly demanding. The challenge to businesses today is to create a resilient supply chain in order to manage and mitigate risk and vulnerability as well as create organization and companies that has a business strategy to sustain over time", says Roy Andersson.

The overall objective of his Docent Lecture is to describe and explain how different quality management philosophies can be combined in the supply/demand chain in order to contribute to its resilience. The analysis is both quantitative and qualitative, based on theory and literature related to TQM, Lean, Agile and Six Sigma.

The conclusion is that there is a lot to gain if organisations are able to combine these concepts, as they are complementary. Quality management approach leads to risks being mitigated, managed and monitored and ensures a more effective, robust and flexible process, very much in line with the Agility philosophy. Quality concepts can contribute to risk control and resilience in an organisation. However, if the companies that use a combined quality management philosophy intend to become more resilient, they must involve suppliers and customers more in their own processes and design products/services and processes together.

"Collaboration with the suppliers and customers and the notion of how to extend a combined quality management philosophy outside the focal company are of importance in order to make the whole supply chain resilient, even has a right business strategy to sustain over time is of impotence", says Roy Andersson.