The impact of risk conditions and postponement on upstream supply chain vulnerability

Several contributions have tried to evaluate supply risk sources but none of them empirically investigates the effectiveness of supply chain risk management in reducing the perceived upstream vulnerability. We aim to increase the understanding of which factors influence the firm perception of supply risk by exploring the relationships among risk conditions, postponement and perceived upstream risks. To achieve our objective we conducted a survey analysis on 54 Italian manufacturing companies. Results show that risk conditions influence the perceived upstream vulnerability. Furthermore, we provide evidence of the effectiveness of postponement in mitigating the effect of technological turbulence on companies perception of supply risks.