Yearly Archives: 2011

Supply Chain and Transport Risk

In our quest for greater efficiency and greater choice, are we really developing robust global transport networks or simply building a house of cards? That is what the Supply Chain and Transport Risk Initiative, nested within the Risk Response Network of the World Economic Forum is trying to answer.

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What are you afraid of?

What do businesses in Scandinavia fear the most? The answer may surprise you…or maybe not. Interestingly, what is most on managers’ minds is very different from country to country. Supply chain risks do not rank very high. Actually, unless you count them in implicitly, they do not rank at all…almost.

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Low Cost Country Sourcing

In this book, which is a more or less unabridged version of his dissertation, Holger Köhler not only presents a (new) system for the systematization of supply chain risks, he also develops a model for the factors that influence supplier risk and brings it together in a novel way that I haven’t seen before.

Posted in BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
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Incapsula versus CloudFlare

CloudFlare versus Incapsula: Website security reviewed. CloudFlare is for the masses. Incapsula is for business. I’m business, and I’m going for Incapsula. CloudFlare is for performance, Incapsula is for security. I’m more concerned with security, so I’m going for Incapsula.

Posted in my BLOGGING
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Blog Review: Risk Containment

This month’s blog is a blog for anyone who works with or is exposed to risk, and is a blog full of personal insights, funny stories and profound wisdom with business and management insights told through a personal lens and seen in light of past and present events, coupled with a solid dose of risk understanding.

Posted in BLOGS and WEBSITES
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SCM: Past, Present and Future

What has been written during a decade of academic research in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) field? A lot, obviously, but despite the considerable number of academic contributions, the literature is still very fragmented, and only examines one link of the chain, not the entire network.

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Disruptions in supply networks

Supply chain disturbances and supply chain disruptions. Not the same and very different from each other. The former can be managed and solved within an established supply chain, the latter often requires establishing a new supply network. Understanding this difference is crucially important.

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Supply Chain Risk Management Research

This is a well-researched and methodologically sound article, which brilliantly sums up the core topics and clusters of supply chain risk management of the past, the present, how they have developed since the early 1990s, and where SCRM may be headed to in the future. Maybe. Or maybe not.

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Stemming the rising tide

Written in 2008 and well before the global financial downturn had companies think of anything but supply chain risk, this study of 110 North American risk managers by Marsh found that only 35 percent considered their companies to be “moderately effective” at managing supply chain risk.

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Supplier Risk Management

Value Generation through Supplier Risk Management is a survey that aims to explore the potential value of effective risk management in supplier relationships and to provide insight into the supplier risk management practices and attitudes of organizations across multiple industry segments.

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3rd Supply Chain Risk Management Seminar 2011

It is now official: The 3rd Supply Chain Risk Management Seminar 2011 will be held in Barcelona, Spain, 26-27th October this year. This year’s program is still in the making but some topics and speakers are already out, and there are a lot of reasons for going to Barcelona this year.

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Supply Chain Risk: Product Design Changes

Supply Chain Risk Management has emerged as an important source of competitive advantage and an effective method of reducing vulnerability in a supply chain. One vulnerability or risk that is often overlooked are product design changes to an already existing manufacturing process.

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Supply Chain Performance Metrics

Many business decisions are made as supply chain decisions, but many supply chain managers are perhaps not fully aware of how the supply chain metrics they juggle in their day to day operations impact the overall financial performance of they company they work for.

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Committed Americans and Trusting Germans

Obviously, selecting the right third-party logistics provider (3PL) for your supply chain is an important decision in supply chain risk management, but not every country decides in the same manner. While Americans focus on commitment, Germans appear to rely more on trust. Why is that?

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CloudFlare or CloudFront – who wins?

In blogging, page speed is important, and after two weeks of rigorous testing I can say that CloudFlare works better than Amazon CloudFront. More interestingly, W3 Super Cache in combination with CloudFlare is better than using W3 Total Cache and CloudFlare together.

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Blog Review: Commitment Matters

Business relationships can make or break a company and Commitment Matters is a blog that will be of greatest interest to those who select, negotiate or manage relationships with trading partners – customers, suppliers, strategic alliances, teaming agreements or channels.

Posted in BLOGS and WEBSITES
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Another volcanic ash cloud crisis?

Air travel disruption after the volcano eruption in Iceland – Consequences for Norwegian travellers and businesses in Norway is a report published by the Institute of Transport Economics and investigates what travellers and businesses did during the volcanic ash cloud crisis in 2010.

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Critical Infrastructure and Resilience

What happens when a business is disabled for a length of time? What are the impacts on its profitability, service delivery, and employees? What are the effects to the broader community? What are the key attributes that can help a business to bounce back or bounce forward from a disruption?

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The Final Frontier: The Northern Sea Route

Establishing the Northern Sea Route as an alternative shipping route to Suez and Cape of Good Hope could contribute to more flexible, agile and adaptable supply chains, because more route choices will result in a higher capacity, and may reduce chances for disruption and congestion.

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Customs Research meets Customs Practice

You might think that customs doesn’t generate much academic research, but in fact it does, and every year the World Customs Organization WCO holds a conference where practice and theory can meet: the WCO PICARD Conference. In 2011 it will be in Switzerland, Geneva, 14-16 September.

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ARTICLES and PAPERS
Call for papers: Supply Chain Risk in China
Supply chain and operations management are increasingly global, and China has become the world's man[...]
Road Vulnerability
Today we are going back in time, to one of the seminal articles in road vulnerability. Katja Berdica[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book Review: Managing Risk and Security
One of my readers suggested this book to me via  a comment on my supply chain literature list pages[...]
Book review: Cost-Benefit Analysis
This book, Cost Benefit Analysis: Concepts and Practice (3rd Edition), by Anthony Boardman et al. is[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
28 Global Risks in 2015
The  World Economic Forum Global Risks Reports. I first came across them in 2008, when the hyperopti[...]
Transport infrastructure resilience
Is it possible to devise a simple framework for assessing the resilience of the transport infrastruc[...]
from HERE and THERE
Fastest path problems in dynamic transportation networks
This research essay and literature review investigates some of the gateways to path finding in stati[...]
ERDAS tutorial
About the tutorial This tutorial is taken from my coursework for the MSc in GIS at the University o[...]