Modeling transportation disruptions in the supply chain of automotive parts manufacturing company

The transportation network plays a vital role in the strategic imperative of automotive parts manufacturing companies. There is a lack of academic and practical studies, which focus solely on transportation disruption analysis in the supply chain of automotive parts manufacturing company. Moreover, very few studies have taken into account the cause and effect relationship between transportation disruption factors. The objective of this study is to analyze the critical transportation disruption factors of the supply chain of automotive parts manufacturing company and to represent the interrelationships using the best-worst (BWM) and rough strength-relation (RSR) analysis methods. The newly integrated BWM-RSR framework considers the vagueness and ambiguity in disruption factor analysis. The applicability and effectiveness of the newly developed BWM-RSR framework are demonstrated at an automotive parts manufacturing company in Oldcastle, Ontario, Canada. The results show that infrastructural bottlenecks/congestion and inadequate skilled labor are the most critical factors to the disruption of the transportation network in the automotive industry. The developed new framework can be used as an effective tool to analyze critical transportation disruption factors and examine the associated interrelationships.