Yearly Archives: 2009

2009 – looking back

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Time for a short review of 2009, looking back at how this blog has evolved over the past 12 months and where it may be headed in the near future. Much has happened in 2009, much for the good, and hopefully, much good is in store for 2010 as well. This blog has seen quite a change during 2009 and by the looks of it, it is headed in the right direction (as far as I’m concerned), but will my readers follow?

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Happy Holidelays!

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

The idea for this post came from a question on Linkedin: Holidays = Holi.delays? One thing is the usual Christmas/New Year slowdown. Add to that Global Warming suddenly giving the Copenhagen Agreement the cold shoulder, almost literally, causing severe weather all over Europe, the UK, and the United States, leaving travellers stranded on the Eurostar trains under the English Channel, prompting a major rethink of Eurostar’s customer service. People were stuck at airports like Frankfurt, Germany or Luton, UK. It’s the same scene everywhere, chaos, chaos and chaos and lots of people desperate to get home for the holidays. But what about their Christmas presents?

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Book Review: HBR on Crisis Management

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Close calls and near misses are not unusual in the business world, but how do companies deal with them? Published in 1999, the Harvard Business Review on Crisis Management is my third post on the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series, not that I intend to review all 73 of them. But this book reflects much of what is on my mind these days. I’ve had this book on my bookshelf for some time now, and I was planning on a review later this month, but the news on SAAB’s demise compelled me to move up my review in my posting schedule. The closure of SAAB is a major crisis by all standards, and is a fitting reminder that this 10-year old book will never go out of date. Why and how do some companies survive, and some not? This book sheds some light on this.

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SAAB no more…

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Revised on: 2011-03-22

What do you when your major customer goes bust? How do you cope with finding a new business partner? How do you react when a major competitor is no more? I don’t know, but I guess many businesses catering to SAAB in Trollhättan in Sweden will be asking these questions in the next couple of days. Well, they’ve had a year to prepare for SAAB’s demise. Who would have thought that when GM bought SAAB in 1989, that it would take no more than 20 years for GM to run SAAB into the ground, taking with it 60 years of proud Swedish car manufacturing history. SAAB is history, but what will happen to its supply chain?

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Blog Review: Contemplating…Ken Simpson

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Revised on: 2011-08-26

It’s Friday, and I think I’m going to make Fridays a day for blog reviews and other “lighter” and “casual” subjects. Today’s blog is Ken Simpson’s Contemplating… blog, a rather recent addition to the business continuity blogging world – the first post is dated November 20th this year. Actually it’s not so much about just business continuity, but about resilience, a topic I have a strong inclination towards, next to supply chain risk. Ken’s blog is a must read for the business continuity professional seeking a wider perspective on what resilience actually means.
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Risk Management in Maritime Transportation Networks

Revised on: 2015-09-11

This week’s focus are risks in the maritime supply chain, and today’s article introduces a new methodology for integrating risk management procedures into planning and design of maritime transportation networks. Risk Management in Maritime Transportation Networks, by by Christian Nedeß, Axel Friedewald, Lars Wagner, and Lutz Neumann is a book chapter in Managing Risks in Supply Chains: How to Build Reliable Collaboration in Logistics, edited by Wolfgang Kersten and Thorsten Blecker. This article has both captured my imagination and clarified my understanding of risks in maritime transportation networks, much of it due to an excellent use of clear-cut graphics, showing that authors not only know their subject well, they also know how to convey it well.

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Risk and resilience in maritime logistics

Revised on: 2015-09-26

This week’s focus are risks in the maritime supply chain and today’s paper sets out a framework for risk, vulnerability and resilience in maritime supply chains. Coping with risk in maritime logistics, by Bjørn Egil Asbjørnslett and Hallvard Gisnaas, is a conference paper, presented at ESREL 2007, the European Safety and Reliability Conference, in Stavanger, Norway, 25-27 June 2007. Asbjørnslett is not a newcomer to this blog; I have previously reviewed some of his works on the vulnerability of production systems. He is also a proponent of supply chain risk and a member of ISCRIM, and it was while trying to find more of his publications that I stumbled upon the 2007 conference paper. The contents were both surprising and unsurprising.

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Risk and vulnerability in maritime supply chains

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

This week’s focus are risks in the maritime supply chain. Today’s article reflects on security in maritime supply chains: Assurance of security in maritime supply chains: Conceptual issues of vulnerability and crisis management by Paul Barnes and Richard Oloruntoba from the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, suggests that the complex interaction of ports, maritime operations and supply chains creates vulnerabilities that requires analysis that extends beyond the immediate visible.

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Risks in maritime supply chains

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Revised on: 2010-04-10

Globalization and international trade is heavily reliant on safe and open waterways. Sea transport constitutes the major part of almost every supply chain, and is thus a major contributor to risks in the supply chain. Maybe I’ve looked in the wrong places, but I haven’t seen much written on it. That is why I will make risks in the maritime supply chain the focus of this week’s posts. Here is some of what I will review…

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Call for papers: Risk Management in Supply Chains

Revised on: 2011-03-21

Operational research has become one of the most indispensable tools in business. Modelling and analysis play a major role in abstract representation of business systems and data analysis and, subsequently, in the generation of relevant information for making more accurate decisions. That is why the International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research has issued a call for papers for a Special Issue on Risk Management in Supply Chains, in order to explore the state-of-the-art applications and methods of risk management in supply chains.

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Book Review: Enterprise SCM

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Revised on: 2015-09-07

Have you ever played SimCity? I never liked Transport Tycoon that much, but I used to play SimCity a lot, and I still do on occasion, when my wife lets me have my own quality time, and maybe that’s why I fell for this book, because the cover picture looks exactly like a scene from SimCity. And in some ways the 2009 book Enterprise Supply Chain Management by Vivek Sehgal really is very “Sim”-like. The book’s focus are the nitty-gritty details of operations and logistics, the flows of ins and outs, while strategic oversight and decisions seem to play a less important role. But only seemingly.

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Dignitary Visits and Supply Chain Disruptions

Revised on: 2011-03-22

Today is an important day here in Norway. Some Mr. Barack Obama comes for a visit to collect some Nobel Peace Prize, creating all sorts of havoc in the transportation system of our small capital along the way. I have a couple of friends who are flying out from Oslo airport this morning, five minutes before the scheduled arrival of said honored guest. I bet they and many other travellers will expect some heavy delays this morning.

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Book Review: HBR on Supply Chain Management

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Revised on: 2015-10-05

Today we continue my exploration of the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series that I started yesterday when I reviewed Managing External Risk, an enterprise-wide approach towards risk management. Today it’s back to basics: Harvard Business Review on Supply Chain Management. It was published in 2006, so it has been out there for a while, but I have been blissfully oblivious to it, preoccupied as I have been with other literature. Besides, the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series, as the “Paperback” in the name implies, are not written for us academics and researchers, but for the professional manager seeking executive perspectives and solutions.

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Book Review: Managing External Risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

I am blessed to have a college library that complies with most of my book acquisition requests and the other day my library told me that the last book I asked them to acquire had arrived. It was the Harvard Business Review on Managing External Risk, brand new, published in September 2009, part of the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series. After flipping through the book my first feeling was general disappointment, perhaps because I am an academic, not a professional. After re-reading and re-considering I have to admit, though, that it wasn’t that bad after all. In fact, the book has managed to summarize the essence of executive risk management in an excellent manner. You don’t need to have an MBA to be enable to enjoy this book, common sense and curiosity about the inner workings of business decisions are enough. I learned a lot from this book.

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Risks and supply chains… stochastically speaking2

Revised on: 2015-09-03

A word of warning: This is not your typical journal article on supply chain risk. Risks and supply chains by Charles Tapiero and Alberto Grando starts out as an easy read, reviewing the literature and discussing the risk sources and risk consequences we all know by now, but it ends in an inconclusive and unsurmountable stack of equations not suited for the stochastically uninitiated researcher like me. Nonetheless, the arguments leading up to the equations are definitely worth reflecting on. In particular, the difference between external risks and risk externalities are worth noting.

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Supply Chain Confidence

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Did a 2001 white paper turn into a 2004 academic journal article just like that? In Mitigating supply chain risk through improved confidence, Martin Christopher and Hau Lee explore the impact confidence has on supply chain performance. Although difficult to precisely quantify, the confidence factor can have significant impact on inventory levels and operating costs, they say. Interestingly this 2004 article also appears as a 2001 white paper on supply chain confidence published by the Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum. Is the journal article just a re-published white paper?

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The @risk Blog

Revised on: 2015-09-09

It is always nice to find blogs on supply chain risk written by a professional with extensive knowledge of the field he is covering. Kevin Cornish‘s @risk blog is such a blog. Judging by the list of tags in his sidebar there is very little that escapes his watchful eye, with topics touching upon anything ranging from employee absentism, food safety, to the more obvious: risk mitigation and supplier risk. There is such a wealth of information I am not sure where to begin.

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Risk & Vulnerability

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Supply chains are increasingly becoming complex webs and networks and are no longer straightforward chains with just a few links between supplier and customer. Supply chains have indeed become complex systems, and the system thinking that pervades Einarsson and Rausand (1997) An Approach to Vulnerability Analysis of Complex Industrial Systems is perhaps applicable to supply chains? Why? Perhaps because, really, there is little difference between vulnerability in supply chains and vulnerability in complex industrial systems.

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Risky ramblings

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Why such a title for today’s post? The abstract of the 2004 article Risky business: Expanding the discussion on risk and the extended enterprise by Robert E Spekman and Edward W Davis promises to highlight six areas of supply chain risk and discuss these at length, showing how they are endemic to the extended enterprise, and develop a typology for categorizing them. And indeed, a lengthy discussion it is, hence the “rambling“. That said, it is a lengthy discussion not to be missed.

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MITIP 2010 – Call for Papers

Revised on: 2015-10-24

For several years, when it comes to ICT-driven innovation and production, the MITIP conferences have proven to be an important forum for researchers from academia and industry to present the results of their work, and to inspire a creative dialogue between the industry and the academic world. Having presented MITIP 2009 on this blog previously, time has now come for MITIP 2010, the 12th International Conference on The Modern Information Technology in the Innovation Processes of the Industrial Enterprises. This time the conference is much closer to home (for me), at Aalborg University in Aalborg, Denmark, 30-31 August 2010. And being on the scientific committee for this conference it is my pleasure to circulate this call for papers within my network, and what better way is there than to do it on my blog?

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