The objective of this article is to move a step forward towards the general knowledge about how to manage supply chain risks by developing a theoretical risk index using exposure analysis. Two questions “why logistics systems are exposed to risks? to which type of risk, a supply chain organization is exposed to?” have to be raised and investigated. The answers to these questions will be used as a basis for the risk index methodology, which allows organizations to assess their exposure level and also to identify which type of risk they need to deal with it. The results of previous step will be computed into a supply chain risk index. To achieve our objective, the article is organized as follows: Sect. 2 provides a brief literature review to position the proposed model against other existing theoretical models. Section 3 provides the methodology used to develop our approach. Section 4 presents the conclusion, limitations and future research.