Category Archives: BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS

Posts inspired by books I have read

Book Review: Security Risk Management – Body of Knowledge

Revised on: 2015-09-12

A Wiley book rarely lets you down, and this one doesn’t either. With a refreshing Australian touch, distinctively unlike many American books on the same subject, this 445-page heavy-weight of a book has it all. Security Risk Management – Body of Knowledge, written by Julian Talbot and Miles Jakeman, is a vast and practically all-encompassing repository of knowledge, filled with accepted best practices, innovations and research in the evolving field of security risk management. This book does not have a narrow scope, it is wide open, and it extends towards business continuity, resilience and even supply chain management.

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Can your business take a blow?

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Revised on: 2015-10-06

Are you prepared for whatever mishaps your business throws at you? If you’re not, you better start learning Dutch and you will be able to find out how you can better your resilience. Why? Because today’s post is based on a Dutch book I found the other day. Published in 2009, and written by Bart Lammers, Walther Ploos van Amstel and Pascal Eijkelenbergh, Risicomanagement en Logistiek translates as “Risk Management and Logistics” and is a short and succinct handbook that I wish will be translated into English soon. Why? Because this book contains an excellent new framework for logistics resilience and how to achieve it. I’ve done my best in translating the essential parts, but I could still use some help from my Dutch readers.

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ISCRiM 2010 Proceedings

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Two weeks ago I attended the ISCRiM 2010 seminar at Loughborough University, a gathering of some of the finest researchers in supply chain risk. Here I had the chance to meet and talk to the people I so far have only blogged about, and it was a very inspiring two days in Loughborough. In order to disseminate the research that was presented at the seminar to a wider audience I have decided to publish the proceedings on my blog so that other researchers, academics and practioners can keep abreast of the latest in supply chain risk research.

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Book Review: Risk Modeling, Assessment, and Management

Revised on: 2015-10-10

First published in 1998 and now already in its 3rd edition in 2009, but still unknown to me, although I have been studying risk since the early 90s, Risk Modeling Assessment and Management by Yacov Haimes is not for those looking for a quick Wikipedia-like answer on how to analyze risk. It is an extensive work that on its downside may require many hours of studying. On the upside, however, 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. This rapidly growing field has important applications in engineering, science, manufacturing, business, homeland security, management, and public policy, and this book shows examples of how to apply risk analysis to all these fields.

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Book Review: Humanitarian Logistics

Revised on: 2015-09-02

Summer break is over and time for a continuation of my blog posts. Humanitarian Logistics by Ronaldo Tomasini and Luk N van Wassenhove was suggested to me by a reader, following up on my post on the special issue of the Journal of Production Economics on the topic of Humanitarian Relief Supply Chains, so I thought I should read and review it here on my blog. The book starts out well and manages to highlight the importance of applying professional supply chain management in ad-hoc humanitarian supply chains, and ends up with a case example that advocates corporate social responsibility as one way into humanitarian supply chains. Not what I expected, but perhaps exactly what is needed to make humanitarian logistics work?

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Book Review: Heads in the sand

Revised on: 2015-09-12

Finally, after 5 days of volcanic ash cloud posting, I can return to my regular topics of supply chain risk and business continuity, or maybe not…as I am tempted to rephrase the title of today’s book into “Heads in the volcanic ash”, but that would not be fair towards all those who did their utmost to deliver their services during the air traffic restrictions faced by the millions of travelers that were in fact stranded all over the world. Heads in the sand by Alex Fullick is a simple book, but it is a book that turns traditional business continuity thinking on the head, because what is business continuity really? It is the social responsibility to survive that your business has vis-a-vis the customers it serves, the suppliers that rely on it, the community it is located in, and most of all, vis-a-vis the people that work there. So easy, and yet so far from reality for many businesses in today’s world.

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Business Continuity in Global Supply Chains

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Revised on: 2011-02-17

Business Continuity is a crucial ingredient of supply chain management. At the same time, implementing business continuity principles in supply chains is really simple. So says Steve Cartland in his book chapter on Business Continuity Challenges in Global Supply Chains in the book titled Global Integrated Supply Chain Systems, published in 2006. Cartland’s chapter is the last of the 19 chapters in the book, and the only chapter touching upon business continuity. Unfortunately. I think this chapter should have been first.

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Published. Not perished.

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Revised on: 2015-11-23

Publish or perish? Publish. It has taken its time, but finally it is there, the book that has my chapter in it. Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks: Implementing Supply Chain Principles, edited by Stavros Ponis, aims to serve as a point-of-reference for scholars and researchers who are interested in studying Risk Management in a cross-disciplinary fashion, linking Virtual Enterprise Networks with Supply Chain Management and Risk Management. I am proud to be able to contribute of this attempt at cross-fertilization between three distinctively different, yet highly interconnected fields of research.

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Book Review: Managing Risk and Security

Revised on: 2015-09-10

One of my readers suggested this book to me via a comment on my supply chain literature list pages, so I decided to find a copy for a proper review. Stephan M Wagner and Christoph Bode are renown authorities within supply chain risk research and as editors for Managing Risk and Security they have come up with a book that focuses specifically on security risks, as seen from the perspective of logistics service providers. And indeed, it was a suggestion well worth investigating, as supply chain security is something that every supply chain manager needs to take seriously.

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Book Review: The Geography of Transport Systems

Revised on: 2015-09-23

This is a book I’ve wanted to lay my hands on for a long time. The Geography of Transport Systems by Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Claude Comtois and Brian Slack is a book that every geographer with an interest in transportation should read. It is also a book that every transportationist with a sense for geography should read. Even if your main focus is just transportation and nowhere near geography, this book will fascinate, because it so brilliantly explains, explores, researches and reviews the spatial impact of transportation systems and how they have shaped the world that surrounds us. It is not often that I fall in love with textbooks at first sight, and this is a book that will not spend much time collecting dust in my bookshelf, as I will read and use it again and again…

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The Definition of Agility

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Although getting close to 20 years old now, The Agile Virtual Enterprise: Cases, Metrics, Tools, written in 1992 by H T (Ted) Goranson, is a book that still holds timeless ideas and visions that are still applicable. While the at that time emerging vision of the virtual enterprise is at the forefront of the book, it is also the only reference I have found that properly differentiates between agility and flexibility and what being agile actually entails. This blog has previously reported profusely on flexibility, let alone resilience and robustness, but has severely neglected agility. With this post, I intend to take a closer look at what it means to be agile.

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Security and continuity of supply

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Aah…the intricacies of the English language. Not supply (chain) security, but the security of supply, as in the continuity of supply. Do you see the difference? This conference paper comes from three Finnish researchers, working with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and was presented at ESREL 2007, a conference that will spark many posts on this blog. Today’s paper describes how Finland views logistics and supply as important to national security and how the LOGHU project was created to develop a framework for identification and ranking of threats and corresponding countermeasures. While the paper clearly shows that the project is still a work in progress, much wisdom and food for thought can be drawn from it.

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Book Review: HBR on Crisis Management

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Close calls and near misses are not unusual in the business world, but how do companies deal with them? Published in 1999, the Harvard Business Review on Crisis Management is my third post on the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series, not that I intend to review all 73 of them. But this book reflects much of what is on my mind these days. I’ve had this book on my bookshelf for some time now, and I was planning on a review later this month, but the news on SAAB’s demise compelled me to move up my review in my posting schedule. The closure of SAAB is a major crisis by all standards, and is a fitting reminder that this 10-year old book will never go out of date. Why and how do some companies survive, and some not? This book sheds some light on this.

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Risk Management in Maritime Transportation Networks

Revised on: 2015-09-11

This week’s focus are risks in the maritime supply chain, and today’s article introduces a new methodology for integrating risk management procedures into planning and design of maritime transportation networks. Risk Management in Maritime Transportation Networks, by by Christian Nedeß, Axel Friedewald, Lars Wagner, and Lutz Neumann is a book chapter in Managing Risks in Supply Chains: How to Build Reliable Collaboration in Logistics, edited by Wolfgang Kersten and Thorsten Blecker. This article has both captured my imagination and clarified my understanding of risks in maritime transportation networks, much of it due to an excellent use of clear-cut graphics, showing that authors not only know their subject well, they also know how to convey it well.

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Risk and resilience in maritime logistics

Revised on: 2015-09-26

This week’s focus are risks in the maritime supply chain and today’s paper sets out a framework for risk, vulnerability and resilience in maritime supply chains. Coping with risk in maritime logistics, by Bjørn Egil Asbjørnslett and Hallvard Gisnaas, is a conference paper, presented at ESREL 2007, the European Safety and Reliability Conference, in Stavanger, Norway, 25-27 June 2007. Asbjørnslett is not a newcomer to this blog; I have previously reviewed some of his works on the vulnerability of production systems. He is also a proponent of supply chain risk and a member of ISCRIM, and it was while trying to find more of his publications that I stumbled upon the 2007 conference paper. The contents were both surprising and unsurprising.

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Risk and vulnerability in maritime supply chains

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

This week’s focus are risks in the maritime supply chain. Today’s article reflects on security in maritime supply chains: Assurance of security in maritime supply chains: Conceptual issues of vulnerability and crisis management by Paul Barnes and Richard Oloruntoba from the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, suggests that the complex interaction of ports, maritime operations and supply chains creates vulnerabilities that requires analysis that extends beyond the immediate visible.

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Book Review: Enterprise SCM

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Revised on: 2015-09-07

Have you ever played SimCity? I never liked Transport Tycoon that much, but I used to play SimCity a lot, and I still do on occasion, when my wife lets me have my own quality time, and maybe that’s why I fell for this book, because the cover picture looks exactly like a scene from SimCity. And in some ways the 2009 book Enterprise Supply Chain Management by Vivek Sehgal really is very “Sim”-like. The book’s focus are the nitty-gritty details of operations and logistics, the flows of ins and outs, while strategic oversight and decisions seem to play a less important role. But only seemingly.

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Book Review: HBR on Supply Chain Management

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Revised on: 2015-10-05

Today we continue my exploration of the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series that I started yesterday when I reviewed Managing External Risk, an enterprise-wide approach towards risk management. Today it’s back to basics: Harvard Business Review on Supply Chain Management. It was published in 2006, so it has been out there for a while, but I have been blissfully oblivious to it, preoccupied as I have been with other literature. Besides, the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series, as the “Paperback” in the name implies, are not written for us academics and researchers, but for the professional manager seeking executive perspectives and solutions.

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Book Review: Managing External Risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

I am blessed to have a college library that complies with most of my book acquisition requests and the other day my library told me that the last book I asked them to acquire had arrived. It was the Harvard Business Review on Managing External Risk, brand new, published in September 2009, part of the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series. After flipping through the book my first feeling was general disappointment, perhaps because I am an academic, not a professional. After re-reading and re-considering I have to admit, though, that it wasn’t that bad after all. In fact, the book has managed to summarize the essence of executive risk management in an excellent manner. You don’t need to have an MBA to be enable to enjoy this book, common sense and curiosity about the inner workings of business decisions are enough. I learned a lot from this book.

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Risk Management in Global Supply Chain Networks

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Supply Chain Risks can be classified as either one of these three, Deviation, Disruption or Disaster, and can be approached using either a Preventive or an Interceptive approach; the former attempts to build in risk tolerance, the latter attempts to contain the damage or impact of an undesired event. So say N Visvanadham and Roshan S Gaonkar in Risk Management in Global Supply Chain Networks, a chapter in the 2008 book Supply Chain Analysis, edited, among others, by Christopher S Tang. Using this framework, the authors develop a simple integer quadratic optimization model that optimizes partner selection and minimizes operational cost variability.

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