Industries and Disasters : Building Robust and Competitive Supply Chains

The purpose of this book is to explore the ways that industries, under the pressures of global competition, balance sustained industrial competitiveness and robustness against major disasters. The book focuses mainly on the impact of disasters on supply chains for manufactured (mainly tradable) goods. A special feature of this particular theme is that companies have to deal with not only disasters that may come someday, but also global competition that industrial sites have to face every day. If, for example, companies add excessive amounts of inventory to their manufacturing sites for fear of the next major earthquake, they may not survive long enough to see the next earthquake due to their loss of global competitiveness. Thus, on a practical side, this book proposes that companies can balance global competitiveness and the anti-disaster robustness of industrial sites, rather than simply choosing one or the other, if they organize their efforts under the principles of continuous improvement (kaizen) and lean production.

The empirical case studies contained in this book were conducted through extensive fieldwork at industrial sites mostly in Japan, which is known as one of the countries that is most vulnerable to natural disasters. Although the book mainly covers natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, floods), there is also a chapter on a human-induced factory fire that had a major impact on Japan's automotive supply chain. Based on the actual responses of Japanese companies (Toyota, Honda, Aisin Seiki, Epson, Renesas, and Riken, among others) to supply chain and production disruptions caused by major disasters, this book gives practical implications for firms that take a leading role in managing industrial supply chains. In particular, guidance is given on the ways in which supply chains can be diagnosed for vulnerabilities and the remedies that may be applied.