Determining supply chain risk factors in food industry

Today organizations are faced with many different types of risks (operational, project, human resource, financial, safety etc). At all levels of an organization, risk management is an integral component of good management and decision-making because of what a lot of standards and guidance documents are created with the purpose of productive organization managing. In environment where all resources are to be used in most productive way, risk management should be considered as a proactive and systematic process to understand and manage risk from an organization wide perspective. In this study, to get the better understanding of supply chain risk management, a real world application is investigated. This application is implied to company for food distribution which is located in Istanbul, Turkey. The project has been done in three levels, starting from April 2013. Because food distribution companies are affected by risk factors more than any other first step of the research was collecting the factors which are affecting supply chain the most. This step was supported by literature review about risks in supply chains, leading manager team of Hedef Gida company, and academician from Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul. By collecting the data about risk factors, internal and external, how strong they are influencing the work flow, and what are their consequences, first level of project was completed. In second level we defined the main problem in the company, the main risk for the SC, possible solution, and finally the method which is the most suitable for eliminating the risk. As a result we found that in supply chain the biggest problem is low capacity in the days when customers demand is the highest, what brings supply chain fragility and delivery delay as a biggest risk. For this problem the best solution is finding the contractor and sharing the job in the busiest days, what is followed by risk in choosing and ranking the right criteria. Choosing the criteria was supported by the opinion of the employees' of Hedef Gida company and literature. To rank criteria DEMATEL method was applied. Based on the results of this project in the future study DEMATEL method can be utilized with AHP, ANP, TOPSIS or any other decision making method for ranking the alternatives, with the purpose of choosing the best supplier or partner for distribution work. Key words: Risk management, supply chain management, food distribution, contractor selection, criteria ranking, DEMATEL method.