Supply Networks and Hidden Critical Suppliers

Abstract
Recent events involving supplier-caused business disruptions bring to the forefront the issue of managing critical suppliers that may exist deep in a supply chain. While managing prominent top-tier, strategic suppliers is well understood, we have only just begun to recognize a different type of critical suppliers we call nexus suppliers. Nexus suppliers can be several tiers removed in the extended supply network and hence may not be in direct contact with the focal buying firm. They are critical because of their structural positions in the supply network. This presentation weaves together a series of papers published in Harvard Business Review (Online), Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, and Decision Support Systems. We will consider the concept of nexus suppliers and the development of nexus supplier index (NSI). Using a publicly available data source (i.e., Bloomberg Terminal), the proposed NSI model is empirically implemented for the real-world network of buyers and suppliers extending out to the fourth-tier from Honda Motor Company as a focal company. The development of NSI has been funded by CAPS Research.

Biography
Thomas Choi is a Professor of Supply Chain Management at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He leads the study of the upstream side of supply chains, where a buying company interfaces with many suppliers organized in various forms of networks. He has published articles in the Academy of Management Executive, Decision Sciences, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management.

He currently serves as co-director of the Complex Adaptive Supply Networks Research Accelerator, an international research group of scholars interested in supply networks. He has also worked with numerous public and private organizations including LG Electronics, Samsung, Toyota, Volvo, the U.S. Department of Energy, and a federal government think tank. From 2014 to 2019, he served as Harold E. Fearon Chair of Purchasing Management and Executive Director of CAPS Research, a joint venture between Arizona State University and the Institute for Supply Management. From 2011 to 2014, he served as co-editor in chief for the Journal of Operations Management.

In 2012, he was recognized as the Distinguished Operations Management Scholar by the OM Division at the Academy of Management. Since 2018, he has been listed as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics for having “multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science.” Most recently, a 2019 analysis of supply-chain research by Babbar et al. ranked Choi’s publications among the most globally influential from 2001 to 2015.