Category Archives: ARTICLES and PAPERS

Posts inspired by academic articles I have read

CALL for Papers: NOFOMA 2011

Revised on: 2015-09-12

NOFOMA is the network of Nordic researchers within the field of Logistics and Supply Chain Management and each year they host a conference on the latest research in logistics and supply chain management. NOFOMA 2011 will be hosted in Harstad, Norway, June 9-10, 2011. It may be a bit early, but the deadline for paper submission is only some two months away. While supply chain risk issues are not mentioned as a particular topic in the call for papers, I am sure that logistics risks and related subjects will be covered nonetheless. I have many times considered submitting a paper, and maybe this time, since the conference is on home turf, I should really do it. So, what are the hot trends for logistics and supply chain management research in 2011?

Continue reading →

Six levels of risk management

Revised on: 2015-09-10

In spite of all efforts to design safer systems, we still witness severe, large-scale accidents. A basic question is: Do we actually have adequate models of accident causation in the present dynamic society? That was the question asked by Jens Rasmussen in 1997 when he wrote Risk management in a dynamic society: a modelling problem. Here he argues that risk management includes several levels ranging from legislators, over managers and work planners, to system operators. Should supply chain risk management follow suit?

Continue reading →

A new and better way of classifying and managing risks?

1 Reply

Revised on: 2015-11-12

Risk. The probability of an event occurring and the consequences of the event occurring. That is how most of us would classify and compare risks in a scientific manner. Does it have to be like that or is there a different, or perhaps even a better way? Maybe there is. Ten years ago, Andreas Klinke and Ortwin Renn set out to do just that, in Precautionary principle and discursive strategies: classifying and managing risks. Here they developed an integral risk concept based on eight criteria for classifying and managing risk. A novel approach, but what happened to it?

Continue reading →

The world we live in: Risk Society

1 Reply

Revised on: 2015-09-11

We live in a world that is full of risk, risks that we to a large degree have created ourselves, and where naturally occuring risk hardly exists anymore. That is a risk society. With that at the back of his mind, Jan Hovden of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, developed a framework that incorporates risk and vulnerability, that includes safety hazards and security threats and that adds both a micro and a macro perspective. It is a framework that fully accounts for most if not all of the risks that we have to face to a larger or lesser extent. Why is this framework not used more often?

Continue reading →

Single, sole, dual, multiple sourcing?

Revised on: 2015-09-22

Old classics never die. While some papers are written, published and quickly forgotten (because no one cites them), other papers stand the test of time and survive as classic or seminal papers. A risk/benefit analysis of sourcing strategies: Single vs. multiple sourcing, written by Mark Treleven and Sharon Schweikhart in 1988 is perhaps not the most cited paper since its inception more than 20 years ago (Scopus only comes up with 31 citations), but it is a paper that is cited in the supply chain risk literature until this day, and for a good reason, as it was among the first papers to examine the costs and benefits of single versus multiple sourcing strategies.

Continue reading →

Risky decisions – just do it, or not?

2 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-03

Choosing the right supplier is a risky decision. Chose the wrong supplier, and you may face a severe disruption in your supply chain. Chose the right supplier, and all goes well. Hopefully. But is it possible to judge supply risk objectively? In the end, all risk decisions are subject to the decision maker’s perception of risk. The question is, does risk perception influence risk decisions? That is what Scott C Ellis, Raymond M Henry and Jeff Shockley try to answer in Buyer perceptions of supply disruption risk: A behavioral view and empirical assessment. Here they operationalize and explore the relationship between three representations of supply disruption risk: magnitude of supply disruption, probability of supply disruption and overall supply disruption risk. This is an article that hits right home they way I view risk.

Continue reading →

Security, visibility and resilience

Revised on: 2015-09-12

The numerous possibilities of disruptions and disturbances in the supply chain demand a supply chain that is responsive to a variety of threats. A non-responsive and hence unreliable supply chain is by definition a vulnerable supply chain, and the keys or tools to mitigating supply chain vulnerability are security, visibility and resilience. So said Theodore Glickman and Susan White in 2006, when they published Security, visibility and resilience: the keys to mitigating supply chain vulnerabilities. Here they present a framework for how these three tools interact with seven basic supply chain concerns, and combined make up 21 considerations for improving supply chain reliability.

Continue reading →

Logistics risks – the new science?

Revised on: 2015-09-08

Can logistics become an academic discipline? And can logistics risk be my new academic discipline? According to my own description, this site deals with supply chain risk research and related subjects. Or should I say logistics risks? Perhaps logistics is indeed a wider and more comprehensive term than supply chain? I may be leaning towards that now, because in Towards a science of logistics: cornerstones of a framework of understanding of logistics as an academic discipline a selection of no less than eight academics from Germany describe the five cornerstones of logistics as an academic discipline, and show how logistics in fact can act as an integrative platform over a wide range of different issues at the micro meso and macro level. I never thought of that before.

Continue reading →

Outsourcing – risking it all?

3 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-12

“The world is at risk and the supply chain is not exempt.” Are you scared? “Supply risk used to be defined as the potential for strikes by transport workers, fires at a key supplier’s plant, or missed deliveries. That simple vision no longer applies.” These pompous words mark the beginning of today’s article, Supply chain risk in an uncertain global supply chain environment, written by Jack Barry in 2004. His article raises some essential supply chain questions, and reminds us that global sourcing may be low cost, but not low risk.

Continue reading →

A grounded definition of supply risk

1 Reply

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Risk has many facets and has been studied widely in many settings for many decades. But risk in a supply chain management context is a rather new field of study, just as supply chain management is a new field of research. At least it was in 2003, when George Zsidisin decided to write his definition of supply risk. In A grounded definition of supply risk he discusses several existing definitions, investigates how purchasing organizations define their own risk, and develops a holistic definition that encompasses both the causes and the consequences of supply risk.

Continue reading →

When your supplier goes bust…

Revised on: 2015-09-09

…what do you do? Is so-called supplier default something you have even thought about? And what if this supplier is connected to others such that if one fails, others may fail too, like an unstable house of cards? That is what concerns Stephan Wagner, Christoph Bode and Philipp Koziol in their 2008 article on Supplier default dependencies: Empirical evidence from the automotive industry, one of the few articles I know of that deals specifically with this topic. Based on empirical data from automotive suppliers, they reveal that default dependencies among suppliers do often exist and can have significant consequences.

Continue reading →

Infrastructure Vulnerability

Revised on: 2015-09-12

This is a paper that has been collecting dust in my articles archive for quite a while, but it is indeed a paper that shouldn’t be hidden to the readers of my blog and it deserves to be promoted. The reason why I like it is because it adopts a holistic approach to model the interconnectedness and interdependencies of infrastructure systems. Infrastructure Risk Analysis Model, written by Barry C Ezell, John V Farr and Ian Wiese and published in 2000 describes an infrastructure risk analysis model that in a straightforward engineering manner considers possible threats, potential impacts and their mitigation.

Continue reading →

Importance and Exposure – Measures of Vulnerability?

2 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-12

Today I am presenting a paper from an old friend of mine. Well, “friend” is perhaps a slight exaggeration, as I have only met him a few times, but his work has nevertheless been a great inspiration to me over the years, since we work in the same field: transport network vulnerability. In 2006 Erik Jenelius from KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, together with Tom Petersen and Lars Göran Mattson published Importance and exposure in road network vulnerability analysis, where they introduce the concepts of link importance and site exposure. In the paper they calculate 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.

Continue reading →

Next time in China: Guanxi

7 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-03

Today’s post is an extension of what I wrote yesterday, in my review of what Fu Jia and Christine Rutherford wrote in Mitigation of supply chain relational risk caused by cultural differences between China and the West, an article that is very much based on Fu Jia’s PhD, Cultural adaptation between Western buyers and Chinese suppliers, where he describes nine important types of cultural differences that Westerners need to be aware of when doing business in China. If you ignore these differences, your business ventures in China, or in much of Asia for that matter, are destined to fail miserably. Today I will present these differences in more detail.

Continue reading →

Supply Chain Risk: Culture Shock

3 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-03

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. Fu Jia and Christine Rutherford from Cranfield University have just published an article on Mitigation of supply chain relational risk caused by cultural differences between China and the West, where they claim that the extent of cultural adaptation between supplier and buyer is what makes or brakes global partnerships that are culturally different.

Continue reading →

Mitigating Supply Chain Vulnerability

Revised on: 2015-09-12

I’m a quantitative researcher, so I usually shy away from journal articles with too many equations and complicated calculations. This one, however, I can not avoid mentioning, because it is brilliantly simple, despite its seemingly complicated looks. In their article, aptly titled Mitigating Supply Chain Vulnerability, Brian D Neureuther and George Kenyon develop 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. Is it still worth reading and using?

Continue reading →

Humanitarian Relief Supply Chains

3 Replies

Revised on: 2011-07-06

Managing disaster supply chains has much in common with managing supply chain disruptions, and a disruption may not differ much from a disaster in both scope and scale. What are the key supply chain factors for improving disaster supply chain management? The International Journal of Production Economics is perhaps not the first journal you would look up in order to answer that question. Nonetheless, their latest special issue features no less than 13 articles on this particular subject, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars with a keen interest in the effective functioning of supply chains in the face of human disaster. As such ,this issue is an excellent introduction to an emerging field: the study of disaster supply chains. Some of the articles which have already been presented on this blog, and many more are to come.

Continue reading →

The causes of logistics uncertainty

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Logistics uncertainty – a new research strand in supply chain risk research? So it would seem, as this is the fourth time I’ve come across the authors of today’s article. In their most recent article Evaluating the causes of uncertainty on logistics operations, just out, Vasco Sanchez-Rodrigues, Andrew Potter and Mohamed M. Naim further explore their transport uncertainty triad model which they started on some years ago, and whose articles have been mentioned on this blog in previous posts. It is only recently, though, that I have become aware of their research that links up perfectly with my own research in supply chain disruptions in sparse transportation networks, and it most definitely is a research that I intend to follow closely.

Continue reading →

State of the art in SCRM?

4 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-12

A severe supply chain disruption has hit my own blog: More than a month without a post. It’s not that there is so little to write about, it’s just that there is so little time to do it, which is why I’ve decided to reurn to a once weekly posing schedule. Nonetheless, what better occasion could there be to resume my posting than the discovery of an article proclaiming to provide a review of the state of the art in supply chain risk management? The literature review and conceptual framework developed by Hans-Christian Pfohl, Holger Köhler and David Thomas clearly identifies the main principles of SCRM and develops a framework and definitions for disturbance, disruption, security, resilience and risk. Supply chain risk management, so they say, is a process with evolutionary steps, involving no less than 17 underlying principles. Phew…

Continue reading →

What goes into resilience?

4 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-10

Resilience. That seems to be the buzzword these days. It seems to be making its way not only around the blogosphere, like on Ken Simpson’s blog, but also in the supply chain and logistics literature. In Ensuring supply chain resilience: Development of a conceptual framework, just out in the Journal of Business Logistics, Timothy J Pettit, Joseph Fiksel and Keely L Croxton develop a concept of supply chain resilience based on an extensive literature search and a focus group study. And quite frankly, this is one of the the better and most comprehensive frameworks for understanding resilience that I have seen, drawing on the quintessence of many years of supply chain risk research. Resilience, in essence, is bridging vulnerabilities by honing capabilities.

Continue reading →