Contemporary trends towards corporate specialization, focusing on core business activities, and seeking partners that enable value creation by supplementing processes with complementary actions in the value stream are the main premises for creating networks of cooperating enterprises. Such complex production and logistics systems require increased focus on managing material flows due to disruptions that appear at various stages of cooperation. Disruptions can be defined as an unexpected phenomenon leading to the interruption or at least the delay of task execution. They have the dimension of a crisis or operational difficulties. Most discussions regarding disruptions in logistics literature refer to defining risk in logistics processes. Tang (2006) considers supply chain risk management (SCRM) as a set of all types of events that can trigger unplanned changes in the system, ranging from internal organizational operational factors to random factors such as disasters, terrorism, etc.
Similarly, other authors specializing in supply chain risk management accept a broad base of potential disruptions as sources of risk, while noting that all such events require extraordinary commitment of company resources. As interest in various forms of cooperation in networks and supply chains grows, research appears indicating inter-organizational relationships as one of the sources of disruptions causing deviations in logistics and production processes. It should be remembered that problems arising in one link of the supply chain usually create them in the remaining links of that chain as well. Many contemporary trends in logistics, including those related to reducing logistics costs by, for example, reducing buffer stocks, make logistics networks increasingly sensitive to all kinds of disruptions. Handfield R, McCormack K. (2008) define a disruption as major delays in production, distribution, or supply nodes that have consequences in the operations of other supply chain nodes. Disruptions usually constitute a bottleneck in one of the nodes, which in effect spreads its consequences to the entire supply chain.
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Source: Logistyka Magazine 4/2012