In the literature, the term ‘resilience’ is also borrowed from other disciplines to
characterise an organisation’s capability to recover to the original operating status before a disruption. In addition, keeping track on signals that may indicate disruptions helps companies to better prepare themselves to prevent, control and mitigate supply disruptions. This often involves supply chain integration and coordination programmes to provide accurate and early information for managing risk such as sharing information related to risk with supply chain partners (Juttner 2005). Finally, recent years have witnessed that there has been an increasing emphasis on the simultaneous and coordinated design of product, production process and supply chain (Fine et al. 2005). Implicit here is the ability of product design to reduce the likelihood of supply risk (Khan et al. 2008). For example, the nature of relationships between customers, manufacturers and suppliers is often established early in the product design process. This significantly impacts the souring arrangements. Designing products so that product variety is pursued through component and interface standardisation allows a company to build a strong and flexible web of sources to reduce supply risk.