Due to the impact of globalization, companies have extended their borders across nations in order to launch products in a more competitive way. However, globalization exhibits various uncertainties and risks that limit the performance of the supply chain. Research indicates that models that incorporate uncertainties and risks will help to improve the resilience of global supply chains.  In the era of technology, we experience the abundance of textual data from various web-media resources related to companies, which can be deployed to understand the impact of risks on the chain. Unlike confidential companies’ internal information, the text data in news articles and social media are often with open access that practitioners can obtain easily. This sets off a way to evaluate suppliers’ capabilities and vulnerabilities utilizing the accessible text data, which would greatly enhance a company’s supply chain structure.

Therefore, this study aims to utilize textual data collected from news articles and earnings call transcripts to assess the vulnerability of the suppliers and the chain. Among many, we considered supply chain resource limits as a subcomponent of vulnerability and collected textual data associated with its sub-factors. Then, we proposed an integrated factor analysis and analytical network process method to model the company’s supply chain resource limits index. Specifically, factor analysis was used to determine the latent constructs of the variables that are grouped under resource limits and their correlations. This latent construct and correlations were then applied as the interdependencies among variables and proceed to the analytical network process to discover the final importance weights of the variables in terms of supply chain resource limits. The results of the study showed that the shortages of capacity, components, and energy supply are the most critical sub-factors. The company’s supply chain resource limits index can be further calculated to assist decision-makers of an enterprise in supply chain configuration design, and improve the supply chain resilience.

The contributions of this study are as follows. Analyzing open access textual data to evaluate supply chain vulnerability can break the barriers that a company’s internal information is often confidential. Enterprises can obtain useful information for supply chain design by applying the proposed approach. In addition, this research takes into consideration the resource limits sub-factors’ interdependence, was mostly in the past researchers and practitioners assumed independence. Moreover, the resource limits scoring method (CRLI and SCRLI) provides an innovative way to rank suppliers, and can further improve the supply chain configuration.


Evaluating Supply Chain Resource Limits From News Articles and Earnings Call Transcripts: An Application of Integrated Factor Analysis and Analytical Network Process

Division / Sponsors: 
Design Engineering Division and Computers & Information In Engineering Division


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2020/volume/83907

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