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
Managing supply chains in times of crisis
How do you prepare a supply chain for a crisis, and how do you manage a supply chain when the unexpe[...]
Black Swan Events
Black Swan events - should we even bother? The October issue of the Harvard Business Review had a sp[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book review: Supply Chain Risk Management
Edited by Robert B. Handfield, the book Supply Chain Risk Management: Minimizing Disruptions in Glob[...]
Book Review: Creative Destruction
Like with so many of my other recent book reviews I came across Nolan and Croson's book, Creative De[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
A Decade of Living Dangerously
Do you remember the movie The Year of Living Dangerously with Mel Gibson? Topically unrelated maybe,[...]
How New Zealand develops resilient organisations
Is New Zealand better prepared for a disaster than other countries? As our infrastructure and organi[...]
from HERE and THERE
Downgrades are upgrades
Time for episode three of "Suitemates", the big new marketing campaign by Kinaxis, a Canada-based su[...]
How Effective Pallet Management Can Benefit the Full Supply Chain
pps pallet pooling
One seemingly small link in the supply chain of goods is pallets; those little timber crates on whic[...]