Understanding Natural Disasters as Risks in Supply Chain Management through Web Data Analysis

Abstract

With the increasing trend of global outsourcing, companies are now facing ever more complex supply chains. When a company operates over a large geographical area, the likelihood of disruptions is potentially increased due to such unforeseen events as natural disasters, union strikes or social unrest. In this paper, we consider natural disasters as a form of risks in supply chains and propose to aid its management by analyzing Web data collected in real-time. Using Twitter "tweets" as our primary source of Web data, a real-time data crawler is developed to collect and analyze tweets that are identified as relevant to natural disasters. In addition, a visualization platform customizable to users' requirements is implemented as part of the decision making dashboard for supply chain risk management. The applicability of such a system and its effectiveness for making informed decisions in risk mitigations are then discussed via a case study.