Supply Chain Risk Management by Mining Business Dependencies

Current supply chain risk management techniques rely on the integration of the business information systems of the entities forming the supply chain. The method is well-suited for small and medium entities, but large Entities are rather reticent in integrating Information Systems with the ones of SMEs. This article presents a risk-reduction mechanism based on mining Business Dependencies that were previously automatically discovered from the Web logs of our multi-server search application. The material gathered in the previous experiments (business dependencies inferred from Web usage logs and information on entities) serves as a support for building Virtualized Supply Chains. The generation of the Virtualized Supply Chains and the computation of the associated risks conduct to the derivation of a risk reduction technique, which can be later applied in the redesign of Supply Chains and replace suppliers having high risk measures with those exhibiting lower risk measures.