Blog Archives

Cutting costs or cutting risks?

Obviously, cutting risks and cutting costs are two strategies that are often detrimental to each other, and after cutting costs simply for the sake of reducing operational costs, you may have to cut corners in order to cut risks.

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When your supplier goes bust…

Supply chain risk management must look beyond the individual supplier and look at dependencies within the entire supplier portfolio. Such dependencies may not be obvious at first sight, and this paper presents one very good approach towards discovering these dependencies.

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Supply Chain Risk Insights

Set up by Zurich Insurance, the website is aimed at helping senior managers and directors in finance, supply chain, operations and risk develop a deeper understanding of the tactical considerations and strategic approaches to minimize impacts of disruptions to the supply chain.

Posted in BLOGS and WEBSITES
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ISCRiM 2010

I am currently attending the 2010 seminar of the International Supply Chain Risk Management Network (ISCRIM) here in the UK. I feel honored to have been invited into this distinguished circle of academics and professionals, and to have the opportunity to present some of my own research.

Posted in my PUBLIC PRESENCE
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Christchurch earthquake and transportation

Christchurch, New Zealand, has been hit by an earthquake. How will the city recover? Will they be able to pull together the resources and quickly return to business as usual? I believe they will.

Posted in THIS and THAT
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Book Review: Risk Modeling, Assessment, and Management

This book is not for those looking for a quick Wikipedia-like answer on how to analyze risk. It is an extensive work that may require many hours of studying. I am amazed at what this book covers – it does contain all you would ever need to know and may not even want to know about the state of the art of risk analysis.

Posted in BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
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Infrastructure Vulnerability

This paper describes an infrastructure risk analysis model, considering possible threats and potential impacts. Their model follows the commonly accepted risk assessment method of fault and event trees.

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Importance and Exposure – Measures of Vulnerability?

The paper calculates several indices for link importance and site exposure for the Swedish road network, based on the increase in generalized travel cost when links are closed.

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The ISCRiM Newsletter 1/2010

Published 2-3 times a year by the International Supply Chain Risk Management Network, the ISCRiM newsletter has the latest on published articles, research reports, PhD theses, weblinks, and some buzz from the people who work with supply chain risk research for a living.

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Blog Supply Chain Risk: Writer’s Block

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed a considerable gap in my postings, with several weeks and even more than a month between posts at times. It’s not that I have been too busy with my day job, not really.

Posted in my BLOGGING
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Next time in China: Guanxi

Guanxi: Connections and relations are what matter most, while contracts, rules and laws are to likely to be overridden if they are in conflict with harmonious relations.

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS
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Supply Chain Risk: Culture Shock

Is culture shock the reason why so many global and cross-culture business relationships fail? When it comes to Western buyers and Chinese suppliers this may very well be the case, and while issues related to product quality or supplier reliability may seem as the obvious cause externally, cultural differences may be the root cause internally.

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Book Review: Humanitarian Logistics

Humanitarian supply chains appear to be the rising star within supply chain management, and rightly so. This book matches humanitarian logistics with corporate social responsibility, and that is not only doing good but doing the good rightly.

Posted in BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
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WCTR 2010

How do Norwegian freight carriers handle the impacts of transportation disruptions? Are “bad” locations synonymous with “bad” logistics? That is the title of my presentation at the World Conference on Transport Research, WCTR 2010, in Lisbon, Portugal, this week. The answer is No.

Posted in my PUBLIC PRESENCE
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Mitigating Supply Chain Vulnerability

Here is a risk assessment index that can be used to measure the vulnerability of different supply chain structures. While it is apparently straightforward to calculate this risk index, it is subject to a number of assumptions that are not equally straightforward to quantify.

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Humanitarian Relief Supply Chains

The timely delivery of critical goods has always been a crucial element of an effective disaster response, but an effective disaster supply chain is hard to create and maintain. What are the key supply chain factors for improving disaster supply chain management?

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The causes of logistics uncertainty

Logistics uncertainty – a new research strand in supply chain risk research? The logistics uncertainty pyramid is further explored in this paper. The Logistics Uncertainty Pyramid Model is an excellent tool that can be used to identify issues of uncertainty, and then map these issues against their sources, from which improvements plans can be developed.

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How Norwegian freight carriers handle disruptions

How are the supply chains of companies located in sparse transportation networks affected by transportation disruptions? What are typical disruptions in certain locations or for certain types of business, and how do businesses and carriers counter supply chain disruptions?

Posted in my PUBLIC PRESENCE
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State of the art in SCRM?

Supply chain risk management is a process with 5 evolutionary steps, involving no less than 17 underlying principles. The conceptual framework developed in this article clearly identifies the main principles of SCRM and develops a framework and definitions for disturbance, disruption, security, resilience and risk.

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Risk and Vulnerability in Virtual Enterprise Networks

Conceptual in its approach and drawing from other areas of research, this chapter introduces four distinct groups of VENS, namely Constrained, Directed, Limited and Free VEN, and concludes that VEN risk management can and should learn from supply chain risk management.

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ARTICLES and PAPERS
Risk & Vulnerability
Supply chains are increasingly becoming complex webs and networks and are no longer straightforward [...]
Acts of God or Acts of Man?
Do we ever learn? How come we humans knowingly and willingly put ourselves and our critical infrastr[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book Review: Humanitarian Logistics
Summer break is over and time for a continuation of my blog posts. Humanitarian Logistics by Ronaldo[...]
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[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
Engineering transportation lifelines
New Zealand is probably not the fist country that comes to mind when thinking of state-of-the-art tr[...]
Will Climate Change have an impact on transportation?
Many studies have already examined the potential impacts of climate change on broad sectors of the e[...]
from HERE and THERE
Sustainability means less vulnerability?
Does sustainability improve a a company’s resilience towards supply chain vulnerabilities? Recently,[...]
Can you outsource risk?
While China has taken steps to address safety concerns after the recalls of last year, yet small pl[...]