Category Archives: ARTICLES and PAPERS

Posts inspired by academic articles I have read

Managing risk together

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Revised on: 2015-09-08

Purchasing theory… I have to admit it’s not one of my particular strongholds, but several of my readers and commenters have mentioned this article, most recently in a comment on A future research agenda for supply chain risk management, so I thought that perhaps I should have a look at it. After all, supplier relationships have been on my blog time and again , so why not? In their 2005 article Risk-based classification of supplier relationships by a Finnish quartet from the Lappeenranann University of Technology, Jukka Hallikas, Kaisu Puumalainen, Toni Vesterinen and Veli-Matti Virolainen set out to develop a new classification scheme for suppliers, based on buyer dependency risk and supplier dependency risk.

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Not all risk is risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-22

I had planned to post this yesterday, when I was taken by surprise by the most severe supply chain and transportation disruption ever to hit Norway and much of Northern Europe: Volcanic ash from Iceland grounds all Norwegian air traffic, and it’s not over yet. Today appears to become another day with no air traffic in my neck of the woods and the social impact is widely felt, to say the least. And today’s post is by no means unrelated to air traffic. My latest favorite author, Terje Aven from the University in Stavanger, Norway, takes risk research to new heights in his most recent article from 2010. In How to define, understand and describe risk he contends that the uncertainty surrounding risk assessments is perhaps more important than the risk value itself.

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Supply chain vulnerability: Mitigation strategies

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Revised on: 2015-09-08

A new outlet for articles on supply chain vulnerability? Perhaps. And actually, it’s not that new, since the journal has been in existence for some 16 years, but I haven’t come across the Journal of Marketing Channels as a source for papers on supply chain disruption before. That is why I was so surprised to find Sources of Supply Chain Disruptions, Factors That Breed Vulnerability, and Mitigating Strategies by Karen E Stecke and Sanjay Kumar. Here they develop a classification framework for supply chain catastrophes and the appropriate mitigation strategies for the various types of smaller and bigger supply chain disasters that can occur.

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Risk versus vulnerability

Revised on: 2015-09-08

What is risk, and what is vulnerability? While connected, they are not the same, and perhaps, often confused? It is important to see the difference, and that is the starting point of Terje Aven’s 2007 article on A unified framework for risk and vulnerability analysis covering both safety and security. Risk is a more general concept, while vulnerability relates to a certain source. In this paper safety and security, normally based on different analysis approaches and using alternative building blocks, are brought together in a unifying risk and vulnerability framework that covers both accidental and malicious events.

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Friend or foe or both?

Revised on: 2015-09-12

Supply chain collaboration, easy or difficult? And can it really work? In theory yes, but in reality? Maybe not. While supply chain collaboration has been hailed by many as the way to improve supply chain performance, more often than not supply chain partnerships fails miserably, because the required prerequisites are not met by the companies involved. Obviously, collaborations that fail can be an unexpected major supply chain risk, or perhaps it should have been foreseen? In their 2006 article Realities of supply chain collaboration, R. Kampstra, J. Ashayeri, & J. Gattorna aim to investigate the gap between the interests in supply chain collaboration and the relatively few recorded cases of successful applications. In the end they develop a framework for what it takes to make collaboration work in supply chains.

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Flexing your SCM muscles

Revised on: 2015-09-12

A supply chain is never stronger than its weakest link, and that (having a weak link) is perhaps the greatest supply chain risk. Rigid supply chains are particularly weak, unlike flexible supply chains that can bend and adapt to new situations. Flexible supply chains can indeed “flex” their supply chain management muscles (pun intended) and show the strength that lies in them. With transportation being a key ingredient in any supply chain, much of this strength comes from flexibility in transportation, that is flexibility in node, in link and in time, as Mohamed M. Naim, Andrew T. Potter, Robert J. Mason and Nicola Bateman write in their 2006 article on the role of transport flexibility in logistics provision. Adding flexibility reduces supply chain uncertainty and takes away many supply chain risks.

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Shrink Shrank Shrunk

Revised on: 2015-09-12

A missed classic? Perhaps, because after reading this article I realized that this in many ways is a seminal paper. Rachel Mason-Jones and Dennis Towill are not unknown to me, and I’ve come across their names time and again, but this is probably the first time I delved more deeply into their research and their journal articles. Their 1998 paper Shrinking the Uncertainty Circle is one of the articles – if not the article – that paved the way for many frameworks for risks in supply chains, most notably the supply-demand-process-control model found among Martin Christopher and his followers.

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Transportation – the forgotten staple

Revised on: 2015-10-03

What a difference a title makes. I only found this article because it was referenced in another article. Why? Because it never occurred to me to search for articles on “risk” using “uncertainty” as a keyword. Bummer. Risk is undeniably linked to uncertainty, but I have never made that mental connection and never searched for articles on “supply chain risk” using the term “supply chain uncertainty”. Perhaps I should have, because Establishing a transport operation focused uncertainty model for the supply chain illustrates very well how transportation is a staple ingredient in supply chains and how uncertainty is a staple ingredient in risk assessments, and consequently, transportation uncertainty is a staple ingredient in supply chain risks.

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Ménage à trois – the good, the bad and the ugly

Revised on: 2015-09-12

No, it’s not what you think it is, but I could not think of a more fitting title (to attract more readers), and had I been the author of this article, that’s the title I probably would have used when submitting my article, although I’m not sure the editor of the Journal of Supply Chain Management would have approved of it. More academically correctly titled, Triads in supply networks: Theorizing buyer-supplier-relationships by Thomas Y Choi and Zhaohui Wu is a fascinating read and a brilliant attempt at classifying buyer-supplier triads into nine distinctively different configurations.

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Humanitarian aid is better when decentralized

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Humanitarian operations rely heavily on logistics in uncertain, risky, and urgent contexts, making them a very different field of application for supply chain management principles than that of traditional businesses. Decentralization, pre-positioning and pooling of relief items are key success factors for dramatic improvements in humanitarian operations performance in disaster response and recovery. So say Aline Gatignon, Luk N van Wassenhove and Aurelie Charles in their newest article, The Yogyakarta earthquake: Humanitarian relief through IFRC’s decentralized supply chain. I believe they are right.

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Call for papers: Humanitarian Logistics

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

With resilience as one the main themes for this blog, from time to time I have written posts on disaster management and humanitarian logistics. Now there is a new source for knowledge on these matters, the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management (JHLSCM). The journal is targeted at academics and practitioners in humanitarian public and private sector organizations working on all aspects of humanitarian logistics and supply chain management. Actually, the journal is not there yet, since the first issue is planned for 2011. However, the first call for papers has just been announced.

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Pyramidal thoughts

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Revised on: 2015-09-26

A promising title with promising content? Perhaps. If you are a supply chain or logistics professional, looking for a paper that discusses the intricacies of managing a supply chain in a disaster area, how to prepare and how to recover, this is NOT it. However, if you are a supply chain or logistics academic or researcher, looking for a new research strand or looking for a new theoretical approach to preparedness and recovery, then yes, this is it. The supply chain crisis and disaster pyramid by R. Glenn Richey Jr is a paper that falls in the category of academically intriguing, but practically maybe not so. That said, it may very well be a future seminal paper in supply chain disaster preparedness and recovery.

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Contingent flexibility

Revised on: 2015-09-10

Can contingency planning increase flexibility and minimize risk exposure to supply chain disruptions? Obviously yes, but what is it about the contingency planning process that relates to flexibility? That question is asked by Joseph B Skipper and Joe B Hanna in Minimizing supply chain disruption risk through enhanced flexibility. Surprisingly, this article suggests that only very few variables of contingency planning are positively related to flexibility…puzzling, isn’t it?

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Managing supply chains in times of crisis

Revised on: 2015-09-11

How do you prepare a supply chain for a crisis, and how do you manage a supply chain when the unexpected hits you? While not providing a direct answer to this question, a group of researchers from the Texas A&M University, has scoured some 118 peer-reviewed and published articles and come up a classification scheme I think is excellent. In Managing supply chains in times of crisis: a review of literature and insights, the three, Arunachalam Narayanan, Ismail Capar and Malini Natarajarathinam use 5 factors and 15 subfactors to separate the chaff from the wheat.

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Risk Disablers

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

My latest acquaintance in supply chain risk research methodology is developing drivers and dependants using interpretive structural modelling (ISM). A good example was provided by the trio of Mohd Nishat Faisal, D.K. Banwet, and Ravi Shankar, which I presented last week when I reviewed their paper on information risks management. As I found out, they used ISM in a previous paper written a year earlier, Supply chain risk mitigation: modeling the enablers, looking specifically (or perhaps more generally) at enablers of supply chain risk mitigation. Again, a fascinating article…

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Community resilience in times of disaster

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Revised on: 2015-09-08

Can public-private partnerships improve community resilience? This question is posed in Leveraging public-private partnerships to improve community resilience in times of disaster, written in 2009 by Geoffrey Stewart, Ramesh Kolluru and Mark Smith, three researchers from the National Incident Management Systems and Advanced Technologies Institute (NIMSAT). The answer: In order to achieve community resilience public and private owners of critical infrastructures and key resources must work together, before, during and after a disaster.

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Certain death: Not risky. Uncertain death: risky.

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

If you know for sure that things will go wrong, there really is no risk. If you don’t know for sure that things will go wrong, then there is a risk. That’s the basic assumption in a paper I just read, titled Identification of safety and security critical systems and activities and written by Terje Aven in 2009. It may sound like a bold statement, but technically speaking, it is a true statement. It is only when the consequences of actions and events are uncertain that these actions and events are truly risky. Agree?

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Information Risk Management

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Openness, partnering, trust and particularly sharing of information has often been cited as one way to reduce supply chain risk. The more you know, and know early enough, the less surprised you may be about unforeseen developments. However, information sharing has its own set of risks. Information risks management in supply chains: an assessment and mitigation framework by Mohd Nishat Faisal, D.K. Banwet, and Ravi Shankar provides a well-founded theoretical framework for assessing these risks.

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Risk Analysis of Critical Infrastructures

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

The vulnerability of critical infrastructures is a recurring theme on this blog, and today’s article has been on my mind for a while. What I like about Critical infrastructures at risk: A need for a new conceptual approach and extended analytical tool by Wolfgang Kröger is how it couples critical infrastructures, showing how one is dependent on the other, picking up a notion I described in an earlier post Are roads more important than computers?. The article also shows how external factors are a major contributor to the risk and interconnectedness of critical infrastructures.

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Supply Chain Risk: Invasive Species

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

With 90% of world trade carried by sea, the global network of ships criss-crossing the oceans provide perhaps the most important mode of transportation, not only for human mobility and for the exchange of goods, but also for the spread of invasive species that “hitch-hike” with these ships, particularly in the ballast tanks. These invasive species carried along these global shipping lanes are perhaps not so much a risk to the supply chain, but a risk stemming from the supply chain. In order to find out how these species travel and where they come from, in The complex network of global cargo ship movements, a team from Germany has mapped the worldwide movements in the maritime shipping network.

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