Potential Risk Handling Alternatives for Supply Chain Disruptions in Liquid Food Production – the case of V&S Vin & Sprit AB, the Sundsvall site

V&S Sundsvall (a part of V&S Vin & Sprit AB) is a Swedish company producing different alcoholic beverages, mainly for the Swedish market. The company has lately paid increasing attention to supply chain disruption risk issues. In another study, one of the authors (Paulsson 2007) developed a model, called the DRISC (Disruption Risks In Supply Chains) model, for the structuring, evaluation and handling of risks related to disruptions in the product flow in the supply chain. The DRISC model covers, from the viewpoint of an individual (focal) company in the supply chain, all product flow-related disruption risks in the total supply chain from natural resources to the delivered final product, and makes it possible to classify the risks, measured as negative result impact, into 15 different risk exposure boxes and thereby to get a "picture" of the disruption risks in the company. In the risk evaluation part of the DRISC model, new alternatives for handling those risks are generated with the help of a list of 22 identified generic risk handling methods. On V&S Sundsvall, the partial risk analysis model was applied first and resulted in a certain risk picture. The risk analysis revealed a couple of risk boxes with a high risk level and also identified a number of individual hazards. Then, based on this risk picture, the partial risk evaluation model was applied. The risk evaluation resulted in a list of some 50 different potential risk-handling alternatives for improved handling of the disruption risks in the supply chain. The application of the theoretical DRISC model on the empirical case V&S Sundsvall indicated that the model can be a useful “tool” when doing supply chain disruption analyses in the liquid food production industry, and also produced some ideas for refinements of the model.