Resilience of Malaysian Public Sector Construction Industry to Supply Chain Disruptions

The uncertainty and complexity of the interdependent global economy have amplified collective exposure of supply chains to disruptive events. In the construction world, the fragmented nature of the temporary project teams and the uncertain operating environment make construction supply chains more vulnerable to these disruptive events. In Malaysia, the construction industry has become the focal point for development through the Government’s “Malaysia Vision 2020” transformation programme, in the effort to become a developed country by the year 2020. However, despite good plans for the development of public projects, the Malaysian Auditor General Report 2014 identified several weaknesses in the delivery of construction projects that caused poor project performance. The dynamics and effects of interconnected risks among construction organisations tend to be overlooked across the Malaysian public project supply chains, making them highly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. This calls for the need to go beyond the traditional silo approach of the risk management process. This research aims to investigate the Malaysian public sector supply chain’s resilience capabilities and vulnerabilities in handling disruptions in the effort to build supply chain resilience against disruptions and improve the delivery of public projects.

A comprehensive questionnaire survey was conducted with 105 construction professionals from two groups of respondents, the public and private organisations in the public sector supply chain to identify their current vulnerabilities and capabilities. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and compared using the Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests. The findings revealed that the public organisations faced significantly higher political threats whilst the private organisations faced significant market pressures. Subsequent semistructured interviews were conducted with 12 professionals in the field to identify the inherent pathogens that make the supply chain highly vulnerable in these critical areas. The emergent pathogenic influences include practice, circumstance, convention, organisation and behavior. Finally, a resilience response framework was developed based on the triangulation of these results. The framework allows the experts from the public sector supply chain to understand the critical vulnerabilities and pathogenic influences of their organisation and their supply chain members, along with the set of capabilities to reduce the disruptive impacts arising from these critical vulnerabilities.