Supply Chain Risk 2011

Posted on 2011-09-15 by

Revised on: 2015-09-05

What is supply chain risk? What are typical supply chain risks? This is the 2011 version of my annual 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 fourth 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. It is a selection- quite an extensive selection, actually – of the more than 400 articles, books and book chapters I have piled up in my office shelves, and in a way this lecture is a broad literature review of anything connected to supply chain risk. 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 and the 2010 lecture on supply chain risk, this year’s is a bit different…again.

New for 2011: New insights and new risks

2011 provided me with a couple of new insights as to supply chain risk:

I simply could not have leave out the impacts and aftermaths of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
I included the risk definitions and risk matrix in this book on Security Risk Mangement, because I found them very illustrative.
I expanded on the issue of risk and uncertainty in the three most common risk definitions.
I thought it might be good to highlight supply chain deviations, disruptions and disasters versus supply chain disturbances and disruptions.
I included a figure on how to reduce risks from this excellent German PhD on Risks in Low Cost Country Sourcing.
Finally, as a teaser and “wake-up call”, since the lecture started at 8:15 in the morning I included a funny TV commercial from Norway, showing risk management in practice: assessing the current situation and visualizing all that can go wrong, deciding what to do and then realizing that you haven’t thought of everything after all: