More than meets the eye
To me, the major point of this article is not the case study of a Chinese manufacturer of Special Purpose Vehicles, but a cause and effect diagram showing how internal and external risk affect all processes in the supply chain. Even more useful is a set of nine criteria used for assessing the trustworthiness of a case study. Not to mention the 80 or so references in the bibliography, where – as always – I didn’t find articles that I thought they would have cited, but more importantly, I found lots of articles I had not heard of before. Add to that a very detailed description of how the case study was undertaken and the lessons learned from it, this article is nothing less than a cookbook in supply chain risk management case studies.
Cause and effect
One very illustrative figure in the article is a cause and effect diagram showing internal and external supply chain risk in a product design change perspective.
Although based on this particular case study, in my opinion this diagram is generally applicable to almost any manufacturing supply chain.
Internal risks are related to:
- R&D risk: The inability to quickly redesign the product to meet customer’s requirements for design change
- Production risk: The inability to quickly and efficiently produce the product with customer’s changed design
- Planning risk: The inability to maintain stable and consistent planning production planning and scheduling
- Information risk: The inability to share information among different supply chain roles and make it accurate, secure and visible across the entire supply chain
- Organizational risk: The inability to adjust the organization structure and operational processes to match the dynamic characteristics of customer demand
External risks are related to
- Policy risk: The inability to meet industry and government regulations, trade rules and legal standards
- Supply risk: The inability to guarantee supply availability, timeliness, cost and quality
- Delivery risk: The inability to deliver on time and to guarantee the logistic capability
Trustworthiness criteria
A very interesting selling point of this article is the use of trustworthiness criteria and how the case study meets these:
- Credibility: Extent to which the results appear to be acceptable representations of the data
- Transferability: Extent to which the findings from one study in one context will apply to other contexts
- Dependability: Extent to which the findings are unique to time and place; the stability or consistency of explanations
- Confirmability: Extent to which interpretations are a result of the participants and the phenomenon as opposed to researcher biases
- Integrity: Extent to which interpretations are influenced by misinformation or evasion of participants
- Fit: Extent to which findings fit with the substantive area under investigation
- Understanding: Extent to which participants buy into results as possible representations of their worlds
- Generality: Extent to which findings discover multiple aspects of the phenomenon
- Control: Extent to which organizations can influence aspects of the theory
I find this an incredibly useful set of criteria, perhaps a few too many, but nonetheless, I think these are the critera every case study should be judged against.
Critique
There is only one “negative” point to be made about this article: It’s a bit on the long and detailed side, too detailed perhaps in its description of the case study. However, I don’t see where it could have been shortened. Having said that, the positive takeaways from this article which I already mentioned in the beginning more than outweigh the fact that it does take a while to fully read this article. Kudos on an job well done.
Reference
Lin, Yong, & Zhou, Li (2011). The impacts of product design changes on supply chain risk: a case study International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management, 42 (2), 162-186 DOI:10.1108/09600031111118549
Author links
Related posts
- husdal.com: Product design and supply chain risk