Yearly Archives: 2010

2010 – a blogging year to remember

Revised on: 2015-09-12

2010 is history and it is time to look back at my blog and how it has has developed over the last 12 months. As always, blogging is full of surprises, and it is impossible to tell beforehand which posts that will be popular and which not, which post that will be noticed by who and which that will be commented by my readers. This post takes a look at 2010 and provides some interesting insights on the traffic and popularity of my blog. Looking back, this post contains some reflections on the experiences I have made through my now three-year blogging adventure. Looking ahead, this post contains my ideas for the future and where this blog may be going in 2011.

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Diamonds are forever – suppliers not

Revised on: 2015-09-08

Today I am taking a closer look at how buyer-supplier relationships evolve over time. This is the buyer-supplier relationship life cycle, where supply chains are dynamic and where supply chain partners are constantly changing: New suppliers are added, others are contractually terminated, cease to exist or become obsolete. Needless to say, nurturing and honing these relationships also improves supply chain performance. However, as Stephan Wagner points out in his recently published article on Supplier development and the relationship life-cycle, supplier development and supplier performance are dependent on the current stage or phase in the relationship life cycle.

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Risk Management Simplified

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Revised on: 2011-07-05

Risk management. Why make it difficult when you can make it easy? That is perhaps what Andy Osborne thought when he wrote his most recent book, Risk Management Simplified. The cover says that is is “A practical, step-by-step guide to identifying and addressing risks to your business”, and it doesn’t come much more practical than this. This is a handbook and a self-assessment tool that leaves practically no risk uncovered. It’s practical, well-illustrated, to the point, not academic at all, filled with case examples and easy to work with. In this post, I will take a closer look at the book, because despite it’s simplicity, it does hold a couple of hidden gems worth mentioning.

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Supply chain risk – in your head?

Revised on: 2015-09-09

The risk perception an individual supply chain professional has influences the risk management strategies this individual chooses to mitigate the effect of potential supply chain disruptions. But does risk perception influence the occurrence of disruptions? In other words, if you think you are at risk, are you actually more likely to experience disruptions than if you think you are not at risk? Enhancing supply chain resilience with flexibility and redundancy is one way to counter supply chain disruptions. But do the chosen resilience measures actually play a moderating role in reducing the frequency of supply chain disruptions? That is what George Zsidisin and Stephan Wagner investigate in their newest article, Do Perceptions Become Reality? The Moderating Role of Supply Chain Resiliency on Disruption Occurrence. This article paints an interesting picture of how supply chain professionals view risk, which risk they perceive and what they do in reaction to these risks.

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Wintry disruptions…again

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Revised on: 2011-03-22

Winter has come early to Europe this year. Very early. While it is not unusual to have a prolonged cold spell in January or February in this neck of the woods, as we did last year, having it in November is rather uncommon. Snow has covered much of Europe that hasn’t seen snow in winter for years,with widespread ramifications for all sorts of transport. Traffic all over Europe as been hit hard, and many rail services in the UK rail have simply been cancelled, the BBC reports. This has truly been the coldest November on record, at least in Norway. Whatever happened to global warming? Are cold winters the new and coming supply chain risk?

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A crisis is NOT an opportunity

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Revised on: 2015-09-22

Time to debunk one of biggest and most persistent myths that has plagued crisis management for more than sixty years, namely the Chinese sign for crisis. Contrary to popular belief in the West, it does NOT mean opportunity. Many will probably have heard that When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity. That is not true. While many linguists know that this is wrong, the myth has persisted to this day and will probably still persist in the future. Why? Because a crisis in fact can be interpreted as an opportunity. But it is not an opportunity because the Chinese thought or wrote so.

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A typology of crises

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Revised on: 2015-09-13

What defines a crisis? Are there different types of crises? Crisis management is the focus of this week’s posts and today’s article attempts to develop a scheme for classifying different types of crises. In Towards a New Typology of Crises by Stephan Gundel, crises are classified according to how predictable and influenceable they are. This generates four types of crises: Conventional, Unexpected, Intractable and Fundamental crisis. Is that a useful differentiation for the practical handling of crises and for research into crisis management? Let’s look at how the author came to land on such a typology.
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Seconds From Disaster

Revised on: 2015-09-03

Accidents don’t just happen. They are a chain of critical events leading up to the disaster. Everyone who has watched an episode of the National Geographic Television series “Seconds from Disaster” will have heard that phrase. It’s the same with supply chain disasters; they are often the result of decision gone wrong and/or warnings not heeded. An insightful article in the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, The Devil Lies in Details! How Crises Build up Within Organizations, by Christophe Roux-Dufort shows how organizational imperfections lay a favorable ground for crises to occur because managerial ignorance makes blind to the presence of these imperfections.

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Risk management – Vocabulary

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Revised on: 2015-11-20

What is risk management in supply chains? The more I study supply chain risk management, the more confused I get. The supply chain risk literature is inconsistent at best at conflicting at worst. There are so many terms and definitions, and each author, book, paper, or article seem to have its own way of describing the subject matter. Perhaps they haven’t heard about ISO Guide 73:2009 Risk Management Vocabulary? After all, it provides the definitions of many of the generic terms related to risk management. That is why this post will present some of the most frequent used terms relating to the management of risk in an attempt to promote a coherent approach to the description of activities. Will it help? I’m not sure, but the least I can do is spread the word.

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Supply Chain Risk 2010

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Revised on: 2015-10-04

What is supply chain risk? What are typical supply chain risks? This is the 2010 version of my lecture on Supply Chain Risk for the MSc in Supply Chain Management and Industrial Logistics at Molde University College, Norway, held today, and this is the third consecutive year that I am giving this lecture. The lecture is meant to highlight some of the current literature on supply chain risk and to suggest further reading materials. You will not know everything there is to know about supply chain risk after the lecture, but you will know where to find it. Each year the lecture is improved from the previous year, and while the main topics are the same, there are always new things I include, so even if you have seen the 2008 lecture and the 2009 lecture on supply chain risk, this year’s is very different…again.

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Hamilton’s Circle of Risk

Revised on: 2010-11-16

Searching for background information in my preparation for tomorrow’s lecture on supply chain risk, I was again reminded of an old acquaintance in risk management: Gustav Hamilton’s Circle of Risk. First conceptualized in 1974, Gustav Hamilton, the risk manager for Sweden’s State Company Limited, or Statsföretag AB in Swedish, created a “risk management circle,” graphically describing the interaction of all elements of the risk management process, from assessment and control to financing and communication. I have not seen it referenced in the international literature, but it does occur quite often in Swedish academic circles, and is frequently cited by both MSc and PhD students. Perhaps time to take a closer look?

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Learning from toys – again

Revised on: 2015-09-12

The year 2007 will be remembered as the year the toy industry was shaken by a seemingly endless stream of recalls. Can we learn something from the 2007 toy recall crisis? Is China really to blame, or are the drivers and causes of this crisis originating from much closer to home? Yes it is, says Mary B Teagarden, Professor of Global Strategy at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, in her 2009 article Learning from Toys: Reflections on the 2007 Recall Crisis, where she contends that much of blame lies with (American) businesses themselves. Much of the focus has been on China and its contractors, but China is not solely to blame, as many of the risk drivers come from the companies who outsourced the production, not the Chinese manufacturers.

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Building the resilient supply chain

Revised on: 2011-03-17

Supply chain risk seems to be on everyone’s agenda these days, with one event after the other competing for spotlight attention. The Building a Resilient Supply Chain Summit, in New Orleans, 9-10 December 2010, is up next. This event, so the conference website says, is the must-attend event for senior supply chain executives looking to evolve their supply strategies to better respond to ever changing risks, market conditions and global compliance requirements. Well said, but that is not the reason why yours truly is promoting the event. My reason for blogging about it is the simple fact that they have an impressive list of related resources on the conference website: reports, articles, blogs (!), interviews and videos. Even if you’re not planning to attend the conference, then at least you should attend their website, which is full of valuable insights, some of which I will highlight in this post.

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Calculating the Value-at-Risk

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Revised on: 2010-11-16

Some of you may remember that I posted about the SCOR Framework for Supply Chain Risk Management earlier this year, and today I will take a closer look at it again, because I recently found a post on scdigest.com, where Mitul Shah, one of the key members of the working group behind the framework, explains how this risk management framework can be put into use to calculate the Value-at-Risk (VaR). This Value-at-Risk is an important construct in estimating the economic implications of supply chain risks and in implementing the best strategies for supply chain risk management. This post is based on those three posts and my personal communications with Mitul Shah, Manager at Accenture Consulting.

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Book Review: Procurement Risk

Revised on: 2015-09-04

“Do yo like living dangerously? Then you should read this book. It exposes you to over seventy types of risk you you can take in your business life.” Those are the opening words of the most recent book on my night stand. Written by Richard Russill, the title Procurement Risk is perhaps misleading, as this book risk is just as much about supply chain risk or enterprise risks in general. In fact, the book makes a strong argument for procurement risk management being just a short step away from business continuity management. Not only will this book help procurement professionals to lift their head from their desks and gain a wider perspective on possible ramifications of their purchasing decisions, it will also help top managers to seeing procurement as a crucial contributor to a company’s well-being and competitive advantage.

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Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability in Indonesia

Revised on: 2015-09-10

Indonesia. 17000 islands spread over a distance of 6000 kilometres. Mega-cities and remote desolate villages side by side. Congested freeways and dirt roads just a short distance apart. Home to frequent earthquakes and volcano eruptions, mudslides and flooding in the rainy season. A logistical challenge for any supply chain, if not a logistical nightmare, and thus prone to supply chain disruptions. One would think that supply chain risk management would find fertile soil here, but does it? According to what Rofyanto Kurniawan and Suhaiza Zailani wrote in Supply Chain Vulnerability and Mitigation Strategy of the Manufacturing Firms in Indonesia: Manager’s Perspectives, Indonesia still has a long way to go.

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ISO 28002 – Supply Chain Resilience

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Revised on: 2015-09-20

Have you heard of ISO 28002? No? You should take note of this standard, because the ISO 28000 series specifies the requirements for a security management system for the supply chain. The standards address potential security issues at all stages of the supply process, thus targeting threats such as terrorism, fraud and piracy. The most recent addition to the series is ISO 28002: Security management systems for the supply chain – Development of resilience in the supply chain, published in September 2010. ISO 28002 details how an organization can engage in a comprehensive and systematic process of prevention, protection, preparedness, mitigation, response, continuity and recovery. This post will take an inside look at ISO 28002 and highlight the essential content.

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