Bolstering your margin of safety against natural resource scarcity

摘要

Natural resource scarcity (NRS) across the world has large manufacturing companies on the backfoot. Since supply is limited, avenues for acquiring natural resources can narrow and pressurize profit margins and operational structures. An elegant strategy for managing scarce resource supply chains is therefore needed to keep the operation of these businesses sustainable. A research paper by Kalaitzi et al. (2018) interviewed twenty-two managers from six large multinational automotive and aluminium manufacturing companies, to determine how NRS informs them in choosing the best supply chain strategies to protect against this business risk.