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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Trade Compliance and Export Control are not just buzzwords in global supply chain. They represent significant risks, and breach of trade rules and regulations can have serious ramifications for businesses, Consequently, knowing the risks is important for any international company.
Historically, third-party logistics providers, or 3PLs, provided traditional logistics services, such as transportation and warehouse management, and nothing more than that, but 3PLs have evolved to becoming orchestrators of supply chains that create and sustain a competitive advantage.
Outsourcing and relying on a third-party provider for logistics, or 3PL in short, can be quite a cost-saver, but is not without caveats. While there are significant benefits, there are also a number of challenges: current requirements, future growth, information exchange and security.
Frankly, if you are investigating how to make supply chains more resilient, and if you forget to mention this article in your literature review, then I would say that, obviously, you have absolutely no clue about supply chains or resilience.
Creating Resilient Supply Chains: A Practical Guide, published by the University of Cranfield in 2003, almost a decade ago, is now perhaps the standard reference for research in risk, vulnerability and resilience in supply chains, and it belongs in every literature review on those subjects.
This paper presents a state of the art review current research on supply chain resilience and comes up with two different frameworks for categorizing supply chain risks and highlights the importance of information sharing and visibility along the supply chain.
Today’s post is a favor towards Mrunal Korde, a MSc in Logistics and Supply Chain student at Curtin Singapore. Mrunal contacted me and asked where to post a survey on supply chain risk management, and after som e-mails I agreed to help him in promoting the survey on this blog.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) make up the majority of enterprises in most countries, and thus often play a considerable role in supply chains, yet they often lag behind in implementing effective risk management practices, which are essential to their survival and their business continuity.
Do we ever learn? How come we humans knowingly and willingly put ourselves and our critical infrastructure in harm’s way time and again? Instead of living with and adjusting to natural hazards, we turn them into natural disasters, by our own doings and short-sighted decisions.
Supply chain flexibility is a decisive factor in avoiding supply chain disruptions. One major contributor to supply chain flexibility is the flexibility of the logistics provider, and a recent paper develops the construct of transport flexibility within the context of supply chain strategy.
This month’s blog review is not just a post, it is perhaps also an Easter Egg in disguise. It is a blog as a blog should be. It is a personal blog and it is a fun blog, but it never forgets its main goal: to spread life’s own lessons in business continuity and risk management.
Security concerns are an issue of importance in any supply chain. This paper presents the current state of initiatives in supply chain security management, and discusses their managerial implications, highlighting the importance of interplay between various business and governmental parties.
I’ve been travelling this week, which is why there haven’t been any posts for a while, and on my trip I experienced first hand the latest innovation in aviation logistics: Point Merge. Effectively, this new system is nothing more than Just-In-Time in practice. Why does this make flying better?
The Journal of Business Logistics (JBL) has just issued a call for papers on The scope, nature and management of Global Supply Chain Risk. This call is intended to provide outstanding visibility to high-caliber, leading-edge research in a broad range of supply chain risk management topics.
On one hand, a disaster relief operation could be viewed as a supply chain operating under an extreme supply chain disruption. On the other hand, a disaster relief operation could also be viewed as a supply chain operating with extreme supply chain flexibility or extreme supply chain agility.
