Resilience of Malaysian Public Sector Construction Industry to Supply Chain Disruptions

The uncertainty and complexity of the interdependent global economy have amplified collective exposure of supply chains to disruptive events. In the construction world, the fragmented nature of the temporary project teams and the uncertain operating environment make construction supply chains more vulnerable to these disruptive events. In Malaysia, the construction industry has become the focal point for development through the Government’s “Malaysia Vision 2020” transformation programme, in the effort to become a developed country by the year 2020. However, despite good plans for the development of public projects, the Malaysian Auditor General Report 2014 identified several weaknesses in the delivery of construction projects that caused poor project performance. The dynamics and effects of interconnected risks among construction organisations tend to be overlooked across the Malaysian public project supply chains, making them highly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. This calls for the need to go beyond the traditional silo approach of the risk management process. This research aims to investigate the Malaysian public sector supply chain’s resilience capabilities and vulnerabilities in handling disruptions in the effort to build supply chain resilience against disruptions and improve the delivery of public projects. A comprehensive questionnaire survey was conducted with 105 construction professionals from two groups of respondents, the public and private organisations in the public sector supply chain to identify their current vulnerabilities and capabilities. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and compared using the Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests. The findings revealed that the public organisations faced significantly higher political threats whilst the private organisations faced significant market pressures. Subsequent semistructured interviews were conducted with 12 professionals in the field to identify the inherent pathogens that make the supply chain highly vulnerable in these critical areas. The emergent pathogenic influences include practice, circumstance, convention, organisation and behavior. Finally, a resilience response framework was developed based on the triangulation of these results. The framework allows the experts from the public sector supply chain to understand the critical vulnerabilities and pathogenic influences of their organisation and their supply chain members, along with the set of capabilities to reduce the disruptive impacts arising from these critical vulnerabilities

Identification of the “Pathogenic” effects of disruptions to supply chain resilience in construction

In today’s interconnected world, disruptions arising from one party in a supply chain network could cause disruptions to other parties in the chain. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that supply chain disruptions had caused a wide-scale impact to the construction industry in various developing countries including the Malaysian construction industry, with increasing report on project performance deficiencies such as cost and time overruns of severe magnitudes. Although risk management is widely practiced in construction, the challenge now is to make systems and construction supply chains sufficiently resilient so that the project organisations can bounce back and thrive from catastrophes and disruptive events. Past studies of supply chain resilience however tend to overlook the underlying latent conditions that reside in the system that made an organisation vulnerable to such disruptions in the first place. The “pathogen” metaphor is used in this study to reflect these inherent hidden vulnerabilities that remain dormant in a system until a critical failure occurs. Although these pathogens are hidden and may not be causing any problem at the moment, they might trigger a later onset problem causing cascading impacts to the supply chain and its operations. While disruptions in construction are often difficult to foresee and is hard to eliminate entirely, these pathogens, however, can be identified and mitigated before a disruptive event occurs, which this paper aims to discuss. This paper therefore presents the identification of key pathogenic effects in the Malaysian construction industry through preliminary interviews with four experts in the field. Overall, the identification of the pathogens in the study will help the researcher to assess how vulnerable the project organisations are to making significant errors in a systematic way, thus providing the foundation to build appropriate strategies for their prevention and build the resilience of the construction supply chain to disruptions

Assembling and (Re)assembling critical infrastructure resilience in Khulna City, Bangladesh

Extreme Weather Events continue to cause shocking losses of life and long-term damage at scales, depths and complexities that elude robust and accountable calculation, expression and reparation. Cyclones and storm surges can wipe out entire towns, and overwhelm vulnerable built and lived environments. It was storm surges that was integral to the destructive power of Hurricane Katrina in the USA (2005), Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (2013), as well as Cyclone Nargis (2008) and the 1970 Bhola Cyclone in the Bay of Bengal. This paper report on work which concerns itself with the question of, given what we know already about such extreme weather events, and their associated critical infrastructure impacts and recovery trajectories, what scenarios, insights and tools might we develop to enable critical infrastructures which are resilient? With several of the world’s most climate vulnerable cities situated in well-peopled and rapidly growing urban areas near coasts, our case study of Khulna City speaks globally into a resilience discourse, through critical infrastructure, disaster risk reduction, through spatial data science and high visualisation. With a current population of 1.4 million estimated to rise to 2.9 million by 2030, dense historical Khulna City may well continue to perform a critical role in regional economic development and as well as a destination for environmental refugees. Working as part of the EU—CIRCLE consortium, we conduct a case study into cyclones and storm surges affecting the critical infrastructure then discuss salient developments of loss modelling. The research aims to contribute towards a practical framework that stimulates adaptive learning across multiple stakeholders and organisational genres