Knowledge Management applied to Enterprise and Supply Chain Resilience. A Teaching Case

Abstract

Typical organisational goals promoted by knowledge management (KM) are being complemented with resilience-related objectives in many organisations worldwide. The need for resilience goes beyond companies, reaching their supply chains in a concept known as enterprise and supply chain resilience (ESCR). In complex times where organisations must learn to deal with disruptive events (DEs), ranging from internal events like inventory stockouts to external events, such as pandemics and wars, knowledge sharing becomes critical. Presenting a teaching case (TC) developed using instructional design principles, which aims to teach ESCR in real-world scenarios, is the main objective of this work. The proposed TC has clear goals, objectives, and learning outcomes, it intends to engage the students in situations that require problem-solving and decision-making. It is an open problem case with multiple perspectives where solutions can vary since DEs are difficult to predict and manage. The case includes detailed context information for the reader to understand and diagnose the situation and, after that, develop and create an action plan and a logic model to solve the problems related to the critical elements of the case. The TC presents a real-life situation, through the present dataset, where an organisation and its supply chain are facing a critical incident, an impactful DE, which is causing severe problems to the flow of products between customers and suppliers. This case has no unique answer, and the solutions require critical thinking.