Posts inspired by academic articles I have read
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a highly quantitative paper, yet it seems to be very applicable in practice. It proposes a hybrid MCDM method based on ANP and Fuzzy TOPSIS to enhance previous solutions for the problem of selecting the best supplier from a set of potential alternatives based on a set of risk factors.
This paper describes the performance of supply chains based on their elasticities of supply and demand. The model can be used to predict a supply chain’s ability to respond to supply interruptions, cost increases, and demand shifts, while also quantifying the degree to which it is prone to the bullwhip effect.
The International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics (IJPDLM) is planning a Special Issue on papers dedicated to Applying service-dominant (S-D) logic to physical distribution and logistics management, including topics such as Supply network resilience and Natural disaster management in supply networks.
Supply chain and operations management are increasingly global, and China has become the world’s manufacturing centre. That is why the International Journal of Applied Management Science (IJAMS) has issued a call for papers for a special issue on Supply Chain and Operations Management in China.
Are you currently planning to write or actually writing a paper on supply chain risk and wondering what would be a good journal to publish it in? Here is one for you: A special issue of Production and Operations Management titled Global Supply Chain Risk Management
