Yearly Archives: 2009

Perspectives on risk management in supply chains

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Today’s article is actually not an article on it’s own, but an editorial to a special 2009 issue of the Journal of Operations Management, dedicated to supply chain risk. Although An introduction to road vulnerability: what has been done, is done and should be done by Ram Narasimhan, and Srinivas Talluri aims mostly at presenting the articles in this special issue, they also look to the side and draw linkages to related research. As such, the editorial serves both as a literature review and and a pointer for further study.

Continue reading →

Road Vulnerability

2 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Today we are going back in time, to one of the seminal articles in road vulnerability. Katja Berdica‘s 2002 article, An introduction to road vulnerability: what has been done, is done and should be done has laid the groundwork for many researchers, and has cited by not few authors since it was first published. It is a conceptual paper that provides the basis for why road vulnerability needs to be a more important issue than it usually is considered as. It is also the first paper to develop a framework for measuring road vulnerability.

Continue reading →

INSTR 2010 – Call for papers

Revised on: 2015-09-11

I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this conference on my blog before., because the call has been out for while already. The 4th International Symposium on Transportation Network Reliability will be held at the University of Minnesota July 22-23, 2010. I have attended INSTR2004 and INSTR2007 and I’m certainly looking forward to INSTR2010.

Continue reading →

Remote Logistics

Revised on: 2011-03-17

Yesterday I was talking about emergency logistics, today it is remote logistics. The other day I came across a very interesting post on Logistics Planning for Projects in Remote environments, a post that highlighted the importance of planning ahead and preparing for the worst when undertaking a development project in remote areas. Typically for such projects is that neither the logistics nor the infrastructure may be in place to the extent the project actually requires. The delivery of supply chain support for a project in a remote location has a number of challenges which need to be considered already at the planning stage. If these challenges are adressed, the projects stands a much higher chance of succeeding. So, what are these challenges?

Continue reading →

Emergency Logistics

2 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Can commercial logistics’ ideas and solutions work in humanitarian supply chains? No. Why? Well, perhaps they could work, but in most cases they won’t, simply because there is a profound lack of technical logistics knowledge in many aid agencies and even more so, very few experienced logisticians working in the Humanitarian Aid community. That’s what Anthony Beresford and Stephen Pettit say in their 2009 article Emergency logistics and risk mitigation in Thailand following the Asian tsunami. This scarcity of qualified logistics know-how impacts directly on the functioning of the relief effort. So they say…

Continue reading →

Risk Management in Global Supply Chain Networks

2 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-03

Supply Chain Risks can be classified as either one of these three, Deviation, Disruption or Disaster, and can be approached using either a Preventive or an Interceptive approach; the former attempts to build in risk tolerance, the latter attempts to contain the damage or impact of an undesired event. So say N Visvanadham and Roshan S Gaonkar in Risk Management in Global Supply Chain Networks, a chapter in the 2008 book Supply Chain Analysis, edited, among others, by Christopher S Tang. Using this framework, the authors develop a simple integer quadratic optimization model that optimizes partner selection and minimizes operational cost variability.

Continue reading →

Book Review:Managing Risks in Supply Chains

2 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-13

To make up for yesterday’s perhaps overly harsh critique of just one article from this book, this is a full and proper content review. Managing Risks in Supply Chains: How to Build Reliable Collaboration in Logistics, edited by Wolfgang Kersten and Thorsten Blecker, is a collection of articles by various researchers from mostly Germany and Austria, and lo and behold, Marco Moder, whose PhD on Supply Frühwarnsysteme has been reviewed on this blog previously, is also among the contributors. This book has been out for a while, but I didn’t discover it until recently, and now my library finally bought a copy for me to read and review for the readers of my blog.

Continue reading →

One bad apple…

Revised on: 2015-09-10

…spoils the barrel? Yesterday I sat down to prepare a review of this book, Managing Risks in Supply Chains: How to Build Reliable Collaboration in Logistics, edited by Wolfgang Kersten and Thorsten Blecker. The book is a collection of articles by various researchers from mostly Germany and Austria, and while many of the articles/chapters maintain an excellent academic standard, one of the chapters does not at all hold up to any standard. In fact, it is so bad it makes me wonder how this could have slipped by editorial control?
Continue reading →

Supply Chain Risk – 2009 Lecture

2 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-06

Supply Chain Risk – The dark side of supply chain management. What is (supply chain) risk? What are typical supply chain risks? This lecture will highlight some of most influential research into supply chain risk, both past research and current research. Last year I gave a guest lecture on supply chain risk at Molde University College, Norway. This year, in 2009, I was asked to do the same lecture, and I said yes. Since I have come one year further in my research into supply chain risk, naturally I have discovered many new references, and so the 2009 version is a bit different from the 2008 version. The basic theme is the same, but many details and figures have changed. I have also been asked to give a lecture in 2010, so you may want to skip this post, and go straight to the 2010 version of my lecture on supply chain risk.

Continue reading →

Mitigating supply chain disruptions

Revised on: 2015-09-03

How could I have missed this paper? I was preparing my 2009-lecture on supply chain risk for tomorrow and while looking for some YouTube videos on supply chain risk to spice up my 3-hour presentation, I came across a short snippet featuring Christopher Tang from UCLA, who was talking about three strategies for building a robust supply chain, related to (1) supply, (2) product, and (3) demand. The video does not refer to it, but fascinated as I was, I did some more digging and came up with his 2006 paper Robust strategies for mitigating supply chain disruptions, which list not three, but nine strategies. Continue reading →

Supply, Demand, and … “Miscellanous” Risk?

1 Reply

Revised on: 2015-09-03

I’ve said so before, sometimes new articles are found in new and unlikely places. The other day I was proofreading the paper of a colleague and something caught my attention in her reference list. A brand new article, just out: Managing disruptions in supply chains: A case study of a retail supply chain by Adegoke Oke and Mohan Gopalakrishnan. Now, here was a chance to learn something new…so I thought, and so I did. However, I’m not sure I follow the authors in their risk categorization: supply, demand and “miscellanous” risk? What is this “miscellanous” risk?

Continue reading →

The Box is back!

Revised on: 2011-03-22

Finally, the BBC Box has returned home, as I was made aware of from a post on @risk the other day. I had near forgotten about this project. A year ago I made a post on the BBC project “The Box”, where BBC News is following a shipping container for a whole year to tell the story of globalisation. The Box is back where it started, and what a voyage it has been, since the voyage coincided with some of the most dramatic developments in the global economy including the first global recession in 60 years.

Continue reading →

Blog Review: The Kinaxis Blog

2 Replies

Revised on: 2011-08-26

I said in my post on Bob Ferrari’s blog Supply Chain Matters that I was going to resurrect my previous habit of presenting and reviewing supply chain risk blogs. A promise is a promise, so here is a high-quality blog for you, the Kinaxis Blog, or as they put it themselves: The 21st Century Supply Chain. And is it a correct tagline? Yes, I think so. But is there anything supply chain risk? Oh yes, most definitely so, very much indeed. Actually, I should have known, because no less than two days ago I was referring to an interview with Gary Lynch, when reviewing his latest book, The Single Point of Failure.

Continue reading →

Book Review: Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Another book by someone from the ISCRiM group? No, not this time, or perhaps, yes, after all. Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability: Tools and Methods for Supply Chain Decision Makers by Teresa Wu and Jennifer Blackhurst sounds like ISCRiM, but it’s not. If it were, it should have been noted in the ISCRiM Newsletter, but it wasn’t. Nonetheless, several of the ISCRiM members have contributed to the chapters in this book, which is well worth taking a closer look at, particularly if risk modeling and decision-making is your field.

Continue reading →

Book Review: Single Point of Failure

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Just out a few days ago, Single Point of Failure is a fascinating read. The author, Gary S. Lynch, is Global Leader, Supply Chain Risk Management Practice at Marsh Consulting, so he knows what he is talking about. The book’s tagline reads “The 10 Essential Laws of Supply Chain Risk Management” and what Gary Lynch is trying to convey is that there are certain basics every manager should know, understand, and act upon. Lynch breaks down Supply Chain Management into ten basic laws, neither founded in academic theories or mathematical formulas, but simple basic principles that anyone can appreciate.

Continue reading →

Risk and Uncertainty in Supply Chain Management

2 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-26

I’ve searched and scoured numerous academic journals in order to find literature I can use for this blog. Sometimes my readers help me and suggest articles I am not yet aware of, and sometimes I stumble upon them myself, accidentally. Today I stumbled upon a 2004 working paper from the Copenhagen Business School (CBS): How risk and uncertainty is used in Supply Chain Management: a literature study of 136 articles since 1970 by Lars Bøge Sørensen, who finished his PhD at CBS in 2005, and who is now a Director of Operational Excellence at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Continue reading →

Critical: Beer Distribution

2 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-11

I’m not in the habit of making Friday a day for funny blog posts, but today’s article highlights a very interesting issue: Beer distribution is a sector that will be highly affected by a supply chain disruption…in the UK. You could even say that beer distribution is part of the UK critical infrastructure. At least, that’s the impression I have after reading McKinnon, Alan (2006). Life Without Trucks: The Impact of a Temporary Disruption of Road Freight Transport on a National Economy. Seriously, the article is about so much more. It shows how dependent our Just-In-Time-society has become on road transport, and what sectors that are most dependent on road transport. Transportation disruption should thus be part of any business continuity plan.

Continue reading →

Black Swan Events

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Black Swan events – should we even bother? The October issue of the Harvard Business Review had a special spotlight on risk, and featured an article by Nassim M Taleb, Daniel G Goldstein and Mark W Spitznagel on The Six Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management. The article discusses the so-called Black Swan events or Low Probability High Impact events, and the fact that these events are practically impossible to predict, so instead of spending our efforts on quantifying and estimating them, maybe we should just let them happen and rather focus on reducing our vulnerability to them (if they do happen). A very interesting thought…

Continue reading →

Graph Theory to the rescue

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Graph Theory. In Supply Chain Management? It’s probably 10 years ago since last time I looked at Graph Theory. That was when I was writing my thesis for my MSc in GIS on Network Analysis in Raster GIS, and while I know that Graph Theory has many applications, I never expected to see it in Supply Chain Management. Now, Stephan M. Wagner and Nikrouz Neshat are using it in their 2009 paper Assessing the vulnerability of supply chains using graph theory. That is a novel approach, but does it work?

Continue reading →

Supply Chain Flexibility in Strategic Networks

Revised on: 2015-09-03

A supply chain as a virtual enterprise network. That is the underlying reasoning in the 2009 paper How to improve supply chain flexibility using strategic supply chain networks by Herwig Winkler. Virtual Enterprise Networks do not play a major role in this paper, but what fascinates me are (1) the parameters defining supply chain flexibility: Transparency, Simplicity, Responsiveness/Agility and Security/Reliability, and (2) flexibility potentials: Structural, Technological and Human flexibility potentials.

Continue reading →