Blog Archives

Vulnerability and resilience of transport systems

Essentially, risk management is all about mitigation, whereas adaptation lays the groundwork for resilience. Risk management is only about preparedness, response, and recovery. By adding adaptation to those three we also add resilience.

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What is risk?

What is risk, and how can it be expressed? Different international standards, such as the AS/NZS 3460 Risk Management Standard, the COSO ERM framework and the ISO 31000 Risk Management Standard do not provide adequate guidance for risk assessments and lack the necessary precision.

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Theory versus Practice

Theory is important in supply chain research, by helping us make sense out of chaos, but what is theory, what constitutes a valuable theoretical contribution and how can theoretical deliberations produce richer explanations and practical applications in supply chain research?

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SCM: Past, Present and Future

What has been written during a decade of academic research in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) field? A lot, obviously, but despite the considerable number of academic contributions, the literature is still very fragmented, and only examines one link of the chain, not the entire network.

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Disruptions in supply networks

Supply chain disturbances and supply chain disruptions. Not the same and very different from each other. The former can be managed and solved within an established supply chain, the latter often requires establishing a new supply network. Understanding this difference is crucially important.

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Supply Chain Risk Management Research

This is a well-researched and methodologically sound article, which brilliantly sums up the core topics and clusters of supply chain risk management of the past, the present, how they have developed since the early 1990s, and where SCRM may be headed to in the future. Maybe. Or maybe not.

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Supply Chain Risk: Product Design Changes

Supply Chain Risk Management has emerged as an important source of competitive advantage and an effective method of reducing vulnerability in a supply chain. One vulnerability or risk that is often overlooked are product design changes to an already existing manufacturing process.

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Committed Americans and Trusting Germans

Obviously, selecting the right third-party logistics provider (3PL) for your supply chain is an important decision in supply chain risk management, but not every country decides in the same manner. While Americans focus on commitment, Germans appear to rely more on trust. Why is that?

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The Final Frontier: The Northern Sea Route

Establishing the Northern Sea Route as an alternative shipping route to Suez and Cape of Good Hope could contribute to more flexible, agile and adaptable supply chains, because more route choices will result in a higher capacity, and may reduce chances for disruption and congestion.

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3PL – a risk orchestrator?

Historically, third-party logistics providers, or 3PLs, provided traditional logistics services, such as transportation and warehouse management, and nothing more than that, but 3PLs have evolved to becoming orchestrators of supply chains that create and sustain a competitive advantage.

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3PL Outsourcing – Challenges and Benefits

Outsourcing and relying on a third-party provider for logistics, or 3PL in short, can be quite a cost-saver, but is not without caveats. While there are significant benefits, there are also a number of challenges: current requirements, future growth, information exchange and security.

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Building the resilient supply chain

Frankly, if you are investigating how to make supply chains more resilient, and if you forget to mention this article in your literature review, then I would say that, obviously, you have absolutely no clue about supply chains or resilience.

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The flexibility of the logistics provider

Supply chain flexibility is a decisive factor in avoiding supply chain disruptions. One major contributor to supply chain flexibility is the flexibility of the logistics provider, and a recent paper develops the construct of transport flexibility within the context of supply chain strategy.

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Supply Chain Security Management

Security concerns are an issue of importance in any supply chain. This paper presents the current state of initiatives in supply chain security management, and discusses their managerial implications, highlighting the importance of interplay between various business and governmental parties.

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Disaster Relief Supply Chains

On one hand, a disaster relief operation could be viewed as a supply chain operating under an extreme supply chain disruption. On the other hand, a disaster relief operation could also be viewed as a supply chain operating with extreme supply chain flexibility or extreme supply chain agility.

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Are supply and demand elasticity a risk?

This paper describes the performance of supply chains based on their elasticities of supply and demand. The model can be used to predict a supply chain’s ability to respond to supply interruptions, cost increases, and demand shifts, while also quantifying the degree to which it is prone to the bullwhip effect.

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Supply Chain Turbulence

The norm in supply chain management is that variability is detrimental to performance as it causes cost in the form of stock-outs, poor capacity utilisation, and costly buffers. This paper questions this approach and argues that in the light of increasing turbulence a different approach to supply chain management is needed.

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Sustainable supply chains

Sustainability has become a huge buzzword, both in today’s business world and within the broader facets of society. Sustainability has evolved from a perspective and investigation of standalone research in social and environmental areas, through a corporate social responsibility perspective, and towards a convergence of perspectives of sustainability as the triple bottom line.

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Transportation Resilience

Resilience is related to three overarching concepts: 1) the vulnerability to unpredictable shocks, 2) the resources or wealth available to a system to help it change, and 3) the internal controllability of relationships in a system, i.e. its rigidity or flexibility.

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Cross-border supply chains

What are the main change and trend drivers for international supply chains? How will future cross-border supply chains look like? In a study commissioned by the World Customs Organization in 2006, they sought to identify a set of foreseeable drivers of change and their predicted impact on global supply chain management for the next 20 years.

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ARTICLES and PAPERS
Maritime Vulnerability
Maritime transport is a vital backbone of today's global and complex supply chains. Unfortunately, t[...]
Global supply chain risk management strategies
A case of mistaken identity, or so I thought, but it's not. There are in fact two separate articles,[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Business Continuity in Global Supply Chains
Business Continuity is a crucial ingredient of supply chain management. At the same time, implementi[...]
Book Review: Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability
Another book by someone from the ISCRiM group? No, not this time, or perhaps, yes, after all. Managi[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
Engineering transportation lifelines
New Zealand is probably not the fist country that comes to mind when thinking of state-of-the-art tr[...]
Global Risks 2009 - Countries at risk?
How will the current financial downturn affect supply chains? That's what we all wonder about, isn't[...]
from HERE and THERE
Dignitary Visits and Supply Chain Disruptions
Today is an important day here in Norway. Some Mr. Barack Obama comes for a visit to collect some No[...]
Customs Research meets Customs Practice
Customs. A real hassle and a nuisance at times, but also a necessary evil in international trade. "E[...]