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1 Introduction
The construction industry is a relevant segment of world-wide economy and at the same time a complex and often underperforming sector. It is characterized with high fragmentation, low productivity, cost and time overruns, and conflicts. Very often project schedule slips, budget overruns, quality is compromised, so that claims and counterclaims problems have plagued the industry ([157] Yeo and Ning, 2006).
From the end of the 1980s the construction industry has seen the launch of a number of supply chain management (SCM) initiatives ([146] Vrijhoef and Koskela, 2000; [5] Akintoye and Main, 2007; [42] Eriksson, 2010) in order to improve internal and external efficiency, reducing waste and adding value across the entire supply chain and trying to remove their adversarial inter-organizational purchaser-supplier relationships and fragmented business processes ([116] Saad et al. , 2002; [53] Gadde and Dubois, 2010).
Scholars widely recognized the importance of SCM contribution to improve company performance at different levels (strategic, tactical and operational) so shifting the focus from the internal structure to the external inter-organizational processes and relations, and so enhancing strong feedback linkages and collective learning. However, up to now, SCM implementation in the construction industry has been scattered and partial ([53] Gadde and Dubois, 2010).
SCM must be properly formulated, strategically planned, organized and executed. Thus, the adopting organizations (mainly the general contractor and its subcontractors) have to deal with managerial, organizational, relational and technological issues which must be appropriately managed in order to effectively apply SCM principles, models and techniques and to overcome the barriers to construction SC application ([105] Palaneeswaran et al. , 2003).
In this aim, risk management (RM) appears as a valuable approach in order to prioritize the most problematic issues in complex and risky project and select adequate response actions ([52] Finch, 2004; [77] Khan and Burnes, 2007; [65] IBM Global Business Services, 2008). According to a project management perspective, risk is an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a negative effect on a project objectives. It is not just about identifying and assessing risks, and putting in place mitigation and contingency strategies; it is also about being able to quickly and effectively respond to realized threats as they arise.
A typical RM process goes through the following steps:
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