Category Archives: ARTICLES and PAPERS

Posts inspired by academic articles I have read

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

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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Supply Chain Risk: Product Design Changes

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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Committed Americans and Trusting Germans

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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The Final Frontier: The Northern Sea Route

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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3PL – a risk orchestrator?

Revised on: 2015-10-06

Historically, third-party logistics providers, or 3PLs, provided traditional logistics services, such as transportation and warehouse management and nothing more than that. However, the increased volume and scope of services demanded from 3PLs have given rise to their changing role, where today they are engaged in strategic coordination of their customers’ supply chain activities. So say Zach Zacharia, Nada Sanders and Nancy Nix in their most recent article on The Emerging Role of the Third-Party Logistics Provider (3PL) as an Orchestrator. Here they show how 3PLs have evolved from providing logistics capabilities to becoming orchestrators of supply chains that create and sustain a competitive advantage. The question is, what is it that defines an orchestrator? And, are 3Pls also becoming risk orchestrators?

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3PL Outsourcing – Challenges and Benefits

Revised on: 2015-09-22

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the flexibility of the logistics provider and how the transport provider plays an important role in supply chain operations, ensuring that they run smoothly and are able to move goods quickly from one place to another. However, relying on a third-party provider for logistics, or 3PL in short, is not without caveats. While there are significant benefits, there are also a number of challenges. That is what Al Ansari and Batoul Modarress investigated in a paper titled Challenges of outsourcing logistics to third-party providers. Here they identify four major challenges a company faces when choosing the right 3PL: current requirements, future growth, information exchange and security.

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Building the resilient supply chain

Revised on: 2015-09-08

Following up last weeks post on a 2003 UK report on supply chain resilience, here is another “spin-off ” from the supply chain research done at Cranfield University: Building the resilient supply chain, written by Martin Christopher and Helen Peck in 2004. Since its inception this article has formed the bedrock for practically every literature review on supply chain resilience. 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.

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Supply chain vulnerability and resilience

Revised on: 2015-09-12

Today’s post is a review of a conference paper written by Francesco Longo and Tuncer Ören in 2008 and presented at a venue where I not would look for papers on supply chain risk: The European Modeling & Simulation Symposium. The paper is titled Supply chain vulnerability and resilience: a state of the art overview, and the main objective, obviously, is to provide the reader with a state of the art review current research on supply chain resilience. And frankly, the paper falls a bit short of doing just that, but it’s nonetheless a paper worth downloading and reading and pondering for any researcher in supply chain risk.

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Acts of God or Acts of Man?

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

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. That is what Kerry Sieh wrote in 2000 in his article titled Acts of God, Acts of Man: How Humans Turn Natural Hazards into Natural Disasters. In his article, Kerry argues for a different approach to handling the natural hazards that Earth puts beneath our feet, and not just acquiesce to enduring the damage and death brought by natural disasters. Proper engineering is all it takes.

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The flexibility of the logistics provider

Revised on: 2015-09-12

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 Mohamed Naim, Gilbert Aryee and Andrew Potter have just published a paper about this. In Determining a logistics provider’s flexibility capability they aims to develop the construct of transport flexibility within the context of supply chain strategy. We assess the role of flexibility in satisfying competitive opportunities while accommodating supply chain uncertainties. In this way, we may then determine the role of different transport flexibility types in delivering strategic outcomes.

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Supply Chain Security Management

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Security concerns are an issue that has gained increased importance in supply chains. While accidents do happen, and while natural disasters may be nothing more than background noise (the understatement of the year, I suppose), security breaches can have more devastating consequences. This paper, Supply Chain Security Management: an overview, by Juha Hintsa, Ximana Gutierrez, Philippe Wieser and Ari-Pekka Hameri, 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.

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Call for Papers: Global Supply Chain Risk

Revised on: 2015-09-10

Supply chain risk seems to be a topic making the rounds in the academic journals these days, and today I received news of another one. The Journal of Business Logistics (JBL) has just issued a call for papers on The scope, nature and management of Global Supply Chain Risk. According to the call, this Special Topics Forum is intended to provide outstanding visibility to high-caliber, leading-edge research in a broad range of supply chain risk management topics. Although many topics appropriate for this special forum may involve the management of logistics-related risk, (only) high-quality research in any area of global supply chain risk management will be considered for inclusion. In other words, it is really your best work that should be considered for submission.

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Disaster Relief Supply Chains

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

While some aspects of commercial logistics and supply chain management are fully applicable for disaster relief and humanitarian supply chains many are not directly transferable. What are the similarities and what are the differences? Can both types of operations learn from each other? In this paper, Supply chain management for Disaster Relief Operations: principles and case studies, three scholars from Indonesia, Nyoman Pujawan, Nani Kurniati and Naning Wessiani propose a principle of supply chain management for Disaster Relief Operations based on visibility, coordination, professionalism and accountability, and then apply it as a framework to evaluate the handling of logistics operation of two recent events in Indonesia. What they come up with is indeed quite interesting.

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Supplier selection based on supplier risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

It’s amazing how supply chain risk papers appear in the unlikeliest of places, and today I discovered a paper from Iran by Ali Shemshadi, Mehran Toreihi, Hossein Shirazi, Mohammad Jafar Tarokh. It bears the title Supplier selection based on supplier risk: An ANP and fuzzy TOPSIS approach and is published in the Journal of Mathematics and Computer Science, not the obvious place where one would go to looking for a paper on supply chain risk. It is a highly quantitative paper, yet it seems to be very applicable in practice. The paper 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. That is an approach I haven’t seen before.

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Are supply and demand elasticity a risk?

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Why haven’t I seen this paper before? And why is it not cited more often? It should. It is called The role of elasticity in supply chain performance and was written by Bradley Hull in 2005, and it develops a model that 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 paper identifies four types of supply chains and examines their distinct operating characters, in particular the impact of rival ﬁrms and the impact of a decoupling point on supply chain performance. What more can you ask for? It’s all here.

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Call for papers: S-D Logic and Supply Chain Risk

Revised on: 2011-03-23

Is supply chain risk is now beginning to enter more and more areas of supply chain thinking? It would seem so. Yesterday’s I posted about a call for papers on supply chain risk in China, and three days ago I posted about a call for papers on global supply chain risk management. Today I have another one, so this is my third “call-for-papers”-posting in just four days. This time it is the well-known and renown International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics (IJPDLM) that is planning a Special Issue on papers dedicated to Applying service-dominant (S-D) logic to physical distribution and logistics management, among many others also including topics such as Supply network resilience and Natural disaster management in supply networks. This triggered my interest, but since I had never heard about S-D Logic before, I had to do some digging and googling first, so I could understand what it was that I would be promoting.

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Call for papers: Supply Chain Risk in China

Revised on: 2011-08-04

Supply chain and operations management are increasingly global, and China has become the world’s manufacturing centre. Is China also becoming the world’s hotspot for supply chain risk? I doubt so., although most of my own posts related to China have a negative connotation. That said, 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. Although I used “Supply Chain Risk Management in China” as the attention grabber for this post, that is only one of many topics for articles that could be submitted to this special issue, which welcomes both theoretical concepts, empirical research and practical case studies.

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Call for papers: Global Supply Chain Risk Management

Revised on: 2011-03-21

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. The goal of this special issue is to publish high quality and relevant research on new ways to manage risk in global complex supply chain networks. Considering how interconnected and interrelated global supply chains are, its not surprising that this topic appears in one special issue after the other in one journal after the other. For supply chain risk researchers like me this is an advantage, as it is often easier to get published in a special issue than in a regular issue.

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