Towards Investigation of the Perceived Leadership Effect on Supply Chain Cyber Security: Building a Qualitative Study in Botswana

Supply Chain Background

In the past couple of years, Supply Chain has been a frequently contemplated topic, especially in the context of its unfortunate current state due to the COVID19 pandemic. According to IBM (n.d.), “Supply chain management is the handling of the entire production flow of a good or service — starting from the raw components to delivering the final product to the consumer.” Essentially it covers the whole lifecycle that begins with the resources needed to produce a product and ends with the final product used by customers.

According to Handfield (2021), SCM relies on two fundamental ideas. First, all products that reach the end-users represent the combined effort of many participating organizations; these organizations are considered a supply chain (Handfield, 2021). Second, even though supply chains have existed for an extensive period, most companies were focused only on their internal operations and ignored the bigger picture, which resulted in the ineffective operation of supply chains (Handfield, 2021).

Within supply chains, organizations are connected thanks to physical and information flows (Handfield, 2021). Physical flows include the “transformation, movement, and storage of goods and materials” (Handfield, 2021). Information flows are responsible for the coordination between organizations that create a supply chain for their future plans but also manage their everyday flow of materials within the supply chain (Handfield, 2021).