Assuring Supply Chain Resilience in the aeronautic industry: a Total Cost of Ownership perspective

Supply chain projects in the aeronautic industry are characterized by a complex set of interrelated activities oriented toward the achievement of specific objectives, such as efficiency, responsiveness and quality (Ward, 1999; Jaafari, 2001). In nowadays complex competitive scenarios - highly characterized by uncertainty, risks, and high level of servitizations - assuring Supply Chain RESilience (SCRES) becomes vital. In the aeronautic industry, this is particularly true not only by considering the complexity of the product itself (namely, the aircraft’s production and delivery) but also in the perspective of its entire life cycle, addressing all the post-sales services (da Silva et al., 2020; Mohammadi, 2020; Singh & Hong, 2020; Saputro et al., 2022). Hence, a comprehensive assessment of risks and vulnerabilities along the entire life cycle of the aircraft represents a Supply Chain Management (SCM) challenge that has been only partially explored (Camara et al., 2016). In this study, we aim to address this research gap by investigating - with a qualitative approach, based on a case study - the challenges and opportunities of Project Risk Management (PRM), Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) and SCRES in the aeronautic industry under the lens of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) (Brad et al., 2018).