Yearly Archives: 2011

Supply Chain and Transport Risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

We are living in a new world of risk that is making this world unprecedentedly complex and challenging for corporations, institutions and states alike. Supply chains are no exception, and 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 (RRN) of the World Economic Forum is trying to answer. The aim is to develop better international risk management mechanisms and improved crisis response across the public and private sectors to deal with the major risk of disruption in transport and supply chains. This post takes a closer look at this initiative and what it is up to.

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What are you afraid of?

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Revised on: 2011-08-01

What do businesses in Scandinavia fear the most? That is what Nordic insurance giant If Insurance decided to find out. So they asked 400 managers in major companies in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland the question “What kind of risk or threat do you think that publicly listed companies in your country fear the most today?” The answer may surprise you…or maybe not, and 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. But what do business leaders in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland fear the most?

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Low Cost Country Sourcing

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Low-cost countries. A dream for some and a nightmare for other others. What are typical supply chain risks in low-cost countries and how can they be managed? That is the topic of the PhD dissertation by Holger Köhler, now available as a book: Supply Chain Risiken im Low Cost Country Sourcing: Reduktion von Lieferrisiken in China und der Türkei. In the 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 he exemplifies the cause and effect of supplier risks in China and in Turkey.

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Incapsula versus CloudFlare

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Revised on: 2015-11-10

Regular readers of my blog will remember that a couple of weeks ago I posted about my website security and business or blog continuity efforts after signing up with CloudFlare for website protection and acceleration. While CloudFlare has been good to me so far, I now believe that I have found something even better: Incapsula. This post will present the results of my highly unofficial and probably highly biased comparison of Incapsula and CloudFlare. Incapsula works similar to CloudFlare, albeit slightly different, and while it would be grossly exaggerating to. After some testing I have decided to make the switch, and this post is about my experience with Incapsula compared to CloudFlare.

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Blog Review: Risk Containment

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Revised on: 2011-08-04

Another month has passed, and it’s time for another dive into the blogosphere. This month’s blog is a blog for anyone who works with or is exposed to risk, and it’s a blog full of personal insights, funny stories and profound wisdom. Slightly belated, due to the recent arrival of my baby daughter, which is why I am now a bit behind on my blogging let alone sleeping routines, this month’s blog review is a tribute to one of my most faithful Twitter followers and re-tweeters, Nicholas Hawtin of riskcontainment.com. Hardly a post on husdal.com goes by without Nicholas retweeting it, and often more than just once, thus bringing a steady flow of visitors to my blog. Nicholas, I owe you one, and this post is my Thank You for helping this blog reach its audience. Hopefully I can do the same for you, by promoting you on husdal.com.
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SCM: Past, Present and Future

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Revised on: 2015-10-24

What has been achieved, or rather: 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 although several studies purport to discuss supply chain issues, most of the existing research only examines one link of the chain, or more importantly only focuses on one ingredient in the supply chain performance mix. So say Larry Giunipero, Robert E Hooker, Sacha Joseph-Matthews, Tom E Yoon and Susan Brudvig in their 2008 article on  A Decade of SCM Literature: Past, Present and Future Implications, where they investigate and categorize some 405 articles from 9 academic journals. Their findings are quite interesting.

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Disruptions in supply networks

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

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. That is why Phil Greening and Christine Rutherford assume a network perspective in their recent article titled Disruptions and supply networks: a multi-level, multi-theoretical relational perspective. Here they develop a conceptual framework for the analysis of supply network disruptions and present a number of propositions to define a future research agenda. The ability to understand the implications of network structure and network relational dynamics in the context of disruption will enable managers to respond appropriately to disruptive supply chain events, so they say.

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Supply Chain Risk Management Research

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

What are the current gaps that waiting to be closed in supply chain risk management research? Here is a paper that claims to have the answer: Identifying risk issues and research advancements in supply chain risk management, co-written by Ou Tang and S. Nurmaya Musa. Not only does this paper investigate the research development in supply chain risk management (SCRM),which has shown an increasing global attention in recent years, it also shows the incremental evolutions and advancements of SCRM discipline, and defines several sets or clusters of topics and how these have changed over the years.

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Stemming the rising tide

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Are you are taking radically different actions than your peers when it comes to supply chain risk management? If so, Marsh Consulting thinks you are an innovator and blazing the trail for others to follow. At least, that’s what they say in their report Stemming the Rising Tide of Supply Chain Risks: How Risk Managers’ Roles and Responsibilities Are Changing. Penned by Beth Enslow and 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 in collaboration with Risk Insurance magazine found that only 35 percent considered their companies to be “moderately effective” at managing supply chain risk, not a very uplifting figure, I must say. Having said that, the report clearly shows what “the innovators” do differently and how they have managed to “rein in” their supply chain risks, as the report says.

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Supplier Risk Management

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Normally, when finding topics for this blog, it is I who have to seek out and find the established or ongoing research that I want to promote. Occasionally, ongoing research finds me and asks for help in spreading the word, and most of the time I am more than happy to oblige. This time it is Peter Trkman and Kevin McCormack, whose research on supply chain turbulence was featured on this blog some 6 months ago. Together with Marcos Paulo Valadares de Oliveira they are currently researching how risk management practices can add value to the organization, what the modifying effects of turbulence are, and what risk management orientation companies subscribe to. For this they are conducting a survey, and asked for my help in increasing the number of respondents by advertising their survey on my blog.

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3rd Supply Chain Risk Management Seminar 2011

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Finally, here it is, the 3rd Supply Chain Risk Management Seminar 2011 to be held in Barcelona, Spain, 26-27th October this year. Ever since I first blogged about the very first seminar in 2008, I have eagerly awaited the annual conference announcements, so that I could promote it here on husdal.com. This year’s program is still in the making but some topics and speakers are already out. With Supply cost and performance risk as a result of deteriorating freight transportation infrastructure as one of the topics, a topic that is very close to my heart, it looks like a seminar I would really like to attend. But there are a lot more reasons for going to Barcelona this year than just that one topic.

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Supply Chain Risk: Product Design Changes

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

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. That is the topic of  a recent article  by Yong Lin and Li Zhou titled The impacts of product design on supply chain risk: a case study. This a highly recommendable article for anyone thinking of studying risk management in supply chains.

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Supply Chain Performance Metrics

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Financial key performance indicators are valuable because they capture the economic consequences of business decisions. Many of these 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 in or work for, say, in the case of 3PL outsourcing. That is the topic of Linking Supply Chain Performance to a Firm’s Financial Performance, a recent article in the Supply Chain Management Review, where Priscilla Wisner, distinguished lecturer at the University of Tennessee, describes the “language of business” and how supply chain mangers can link their performance measure to business performance measures.

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Committed Americans and Trusting Germans

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Obviously, selecting the right third-party logistics provider (3PL) for your supply chain is an important decision in supply chain risk management. Here, trust and commitment are two highly interrelated notions that stimulate and facilitate customer loyalty and a long-lasting buyer-supplier relationship that can contribute to mitigating logistics risks. However, customer (and supplier) loyalty is formed differently in different countries. That is at the core of Commitment and Trust as Drivers of Loyalty in Logistics Outsourcing Relationships: Cultural Differences Between the United States and Germany, written jointly by Carl Marcus Wallenburg, David L. Cahill, A. Michael Knemeyer, and Thomas J. Goldsby. Is 3PL outsourcing in Germany really that much different from 3PL outsourcing in the US?
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CloudFlare or CloudFront – who wins?

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Have you heard of CloudFlare? I hadn’t either until two weeks ago, but as a business blogger, CloudFlare should be among the first on the list of services to consider.  In a previous post comparing delivery speed in logistics with the page loading speed of a blog I described how I used Amazon CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network CDN to improve user experience by making my pages load faster.  CloudFlare, I dare say, works much better. In short, CloudFlare is a security gate, slash CDN, slash cache, three-in-one.  And, best of all,  it’s a free service.  But is it really that good? Over the last two weeks I put both CloudFlare and CloudFront to the test, and here is my experience with CloudFlare and what I found. You may also want to read my newest review: CloudFlare versus Incapsula

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Blog Review: Commitment Matters

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Revised on: 2011-05-26

It’s time for another blog review, and this month’s featured blog has been on my radar for quite some time. Looking at the date stamp on the original draft, it has actually been on my mind (or actually not) since 14 November 2009, that is 18 months almost to the day. It is Tim Cummins’ Commitment Matters. In Tim’s own words, it 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. A bold statement, but Tim holds what he promises. Tim surely knows his way around business relationships and how they can make or break a company and he stays true to his tagline, which reads Managing Trading Relationships in the Global Networked Economy. A blog for our time?

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Another volcanic ash cloud crisis?

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

Rewind your thoughts one year: Iceland. Volcano eruption. Air travel. Then look at today’s news. Are we facing yet another volcanic ash cloud crisis? It would seem so, as airlines have already begun cancelling flights in and out of Northern Europe, including Scotland. The big question is, have we learned last year’s lessons or will this be another scramble to the rescue sort crisis management? So, what did happen last year, and what did travellers do? That is what the Norwegian Institute of Transport Economics investigated and wrote up in a report called Air travel disruption after the volcano eruption in Iceland – Consequences for Norwegian travellers and businesses in Norway, published in late 2010.  While the report is written in Norwegian, there is a three-page English summary, from which much of this post content is taken.

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Critical Infrastructure and Resilience

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

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 flow-on effects to the broader community? What are the key attributes that can help a business to bounce back or bounce forward from a disruption? Those are the issues the Australian Resilience Expert Advisory Group REAG discusses in a position paper titled Organisational Resilience. I was alerted to this paper by a recent post on the blog of Ken Simpson, a resilience expert and blogger from Australia.  The paper details a set of core principles and resilience attributes that can be applied across a diverse range of critical infrastructure organisations, and although it is aimed at the individual business and its management, it is a paper that makes sense in a range of organizational settings.

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The Final Frontier: The Northern Sea Route

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Sought after by polar explorers and long awaited by the shipping community: The Northern Sea Route. Year by year the Arctic summer ice cap is melting  and the race will be soon be on to take part in what is perhaps the last and final adventure in the development of maritime logistics and global shipping lanes. In The Northern Sea Route versus the Suez Canal: cases from bulk shipping, two colleagues of mine, Halvor Schøyen and Svein Bråthen, explore the potential opportunities and possible risks of what is a new shortcut between Europe and Asia. While this additional shipping route may give more flexibility, it is also a highly seasonal and highly uncertain route. Having said that, it is also a route that could be highly profitable.

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Customs Research meets Customs Practice

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Revised on: 2011-08-01

Customs. A real hassle and a nuisance at times, but also a necessary evil in international trade. “Evil” is perhaps the wrong word here, although having been questioned by customs officers at Melbourne airport once, playing the Devil’s Advocate seemed to be their favorite game, so evil isn’t that wrong, as far as my experience goes. Anyway, every global supply chain must at some point cross some border and that is where customs comes into play. You might think that customs is not much of a field for academic research, but in fact it is, and every year since 2006 the World Customs Organization WCO has held a conference where practice and theory can meet. The WCO Partnership In Customs Academic Research and Development Conference 2011 or PICARD Conference 2011 will be in Switzerland Geneva, 14-16 September, with a focus on these four issues: Co-ordinated Border Management, Performance measurement of Customs, Economic security and poverty reduction, and Integrity.

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