Today's Supply chain is expanding at a higher rate than before and can cover many different continents, which means that organizations are exposing themselves to a high variety of risks. An area that gets affected a lot by this trend is the organizations sourcing departments, which gets more complex the bigger it gets. It becomes harder to identify uncertainties and risks that can come to affect the inbound flow of goods and services. Studies around the subject risk management focus mostly on all kinds of risks that can come to affect a company and its supply chain. This is what makes this study relevant because it specifies around managing supply risks and how it is archived by Swedish companies. The purpose of this study is to create an understanding of what can come to affect the inbound flow of goods and services and what kind of approaches the studied companies can have to avoid or mitigate different kinds of supply risks. To fulfill this study's purpose, the purpose has been broken down into two questions and will be answered from both a theoretical and company point of view.
The empirical part of this study consists of three interviews with three different companies and the information that have been collected by these three interviews has then later been analyzed and connected with earlier theory. This has then laid the foundation for the study's findings. One finding that has been made is that different kinds of sourcing strategies create different kinds of supply risks, which leads to that companies needs to customize their risk management activities after their sourcing strategies.
The study's findings can help companies get a greater understanding of different factors that may affect their sourcing and also what you should keep in mind when formulating a risk management strategy.