Category Archives: ARTICLES and PAPERS

Posts inspired by academic articles I have read

SME: A supply chain risk?

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Does having Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in your supply chain constitute an increased exposure to supply chain risk? Particularly if these SMEs occupy business-critical positions in the supply chain? That’s the question Peter Finch asks in his 2004 article simply (or boldy?) titled Supply Chain Risk Management. I came across this article by mere accident, because it has not been much referenced in the supply chain risk literature. Perhaps, because Peter Finch is not an academic, but a management consultant, and because there is very little academic literature in his reference list, hence not worth mentioning? I don’t think so. This article can very well stand on its own and excellently explains the role that SMEs have in adressing risks in supply chains

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Supply Chain Risk Literature: a complete review

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Finally, here it is, the complete review of supply chain risk. At least by the looks of it. Supply chain risks: a review and typology, is a 2009 article by two scholars from the University of Kentucky, Shashank Rao and Thomas J Goldsby, who review, synthesize and typify some 160 or so articles in supply chain risk and risk management. But is it really a complete review? That’s what I wanted to find out.

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Risks in maritime supply chains

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Revised on: 2010-04-10

Globalization and international trade is heavily reliant on safe and open waterways. Sea transport constitutes the major part of almost every supply chain, and is thus a major contributor to risks in the supply chain. Maybe I’ve looked in the wrong places, but I haven’t seen much written on it. That is why I will make risks in the maritime supply chain the focus of this week’s posts. Here is some of what I will review…

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Call for papers: Risk Management in Supply Chains

Revised on: 2011-03-21

Operational research has become one of the most indispensable tools in business. Modelling and analysis play a major role in abstract representation of business systems and data analysis and, subsequently, in the generation of relevant information for making more accurate decisions. That is why the International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research has issued a call for papers for a Special Issue on Risk Management in Supply Chains, in order to explore the state-of-the-art applications and methods of risk management in supply chains.

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Risks and supply chains… stochastically speaking2

Revised on: 2015-09-03

A word of warning: This is not your typical journal article on supply chain risk. Risks and supply chains by Charles Tapiero and Alberto Grando starts out as an easy read, reviewing the literature and discussing the risk sources and risk consequences we all know by now, but it ends in an inconclusive and unsurmountable stack of equations not suited for the stochastically uninitiated researcher like me. Nonetheless, the arguments leading up to the equations are definitely worth reflecting on. In particular, the difference between external risks and risk externalities are worth noting.

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Supply Chain Confidence

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Did a 2001 white paper turn into a 2004 academic journal article just like that? In Mitigating supply chain risk through improved confidence, Martin Christopher and Hau Lee explore the impact confidence has on supply chain performance. Although difficult to precisely quantify, the confidence factor can have significant impact on inventory levels and operating costs, they say. Interestingly this 2004 article also appears as a 2001 white paper on supply chain confidence published by the Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum. Is the journal article just a re-published white paper?

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Risk & Vulnerability

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Supply chains are increasingly becoming complex webs and networks and are no longer straightforward chains with just a few links between supplier and customer. Supply chains have indeed become complex systems, and the system thinking that pervades Einarsson and Rausand (1997) An Approach to Vulnerability Analysis of Complex Industrial Systems is perhaps applicable to supply chains? Why? Perhaps because, really, there is little difference between vulnerability in supply chains and vulnerability in complex industrial systems.

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Risky ramblings

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Why such a title for today’s post? The abstract of the 2004 article Risky business: Expanding the discussion on risk and the extended enterprise by Robert E Spekman and Edward W Davis promises to highlight six areas of supply chain risk and discuss these at length, showing how they are endemic to the extended enterprise, and develop a typology for categorizing them. And indeed, a lengthy discussion it is, hence the “rambling“. That said, it is a lengthy discussion not to be missed.

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Perspectives on risk management in supply chains

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Today’s article is actually not an article on it’s own, but an editorial to a special 2009 issue of the Journal of Operations Management, dedicated to supply chain risk. Although An introduction to road vulnerability: what has been done, is done and should be done by Ram Narasimhan, and Srinivas Talluri aims mostly at presenting the articles in this special issue, they also look to the side and draw linkages to related research. As such, the editorial serves both as a literature review and and a pointer for further study.

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Road Vulnerability

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Today we are going back in time, to one of the seminal articles in road vulnerability. Katja Berdica‘s 2002 article, An introduction to road vulnerability: what has been done, is done and should be done has laid the groundwork for many researchers, and has cited by not few authors since it was first published. It is a conceptual paper that provides the basis for why road vulnerability needs to be a more important issue than it usually is considered as. It is also the first paper to develop a framework for measuring road vulnerability.

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Emergency Logistics

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Can commercial logistics’ ideas and solutions work in humanitarian supply chains? No. Why? Well, perhaps they could work, but in most cases they won’t, simply because there is a profound lack of technical logistics knowledge in many aid agencies and even more so, very few experienced logisticians working in the Humanitarian Aid community. That’s what Anthony Beresford and Stephen Pettit say in their 2009 article Emergency logistics and risk mitigation in Thailand following the Asian tsunami. This scarcity of qualified logistics know-how impacts directly on the functioning of the relief effort. So they say…

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Mitigating supply chain disruptions

Revised on: 2015-09-03

How could I have missed this paper? I was preparing my 2009-lecture on supply chain risk for tomorrow and while looking for some YouTube videos on supply chain risk to spice up my 3-hour presentation, I came across a short snippet featuring Christopher Tang from UCLA, who was talking about three strategies for building a robust supply chain, related to (1) supply, (2) product, and (3) demand. The video does not refer to it, but fascinated as I was, I did some more digging and came up with his 2006 paper Robust strategies for mitigating supply chain disruptions, which list not three, but nine strategies. Continue reading →

Supply, Demand, and … “Miscellanous” Risk?

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

I’ve said so before, sometimes new articles are found in new and unlikely places. The other day I was proofreading the paper of a colleague and something caught my attention in her reference list. A brand new article, just out: Managing disruptions in supply chains: A case study of a retail supply chain by Adegoke Oke and Mohan Gopalakrishnan. Now, here was a chance to learn something new…so I thought, and so I did. However, I’m not sure I follow the authors in their risk categorization: supply, demand and “miscellanous” risk? What is this “miscellanous” risk?

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Risk and Uncertainty in Supply Chain Management

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Revised on: 2015-09-26

I’ve searched and scoured numerous academic journals in order to find literature I can use for this blog. Sometimes my readers help me and suggest articles I am not yet aware of, and sometimes I stumble upon them myself, accidentally. Today I stumbled upon a 2004 working paper from the Copenhagen Business School (CBS): How risk and uncertainty is used in Supply Chain Management: a literature study of 136 articles since 1970 by Lars Bøge Sørensen, who finished his PhD at CBS in 2005, and who is now a Director of Operational Excellence at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

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Critical: Beer Distribution

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

I’m not in the habit of making Friday a day for funny blog posts, but today’s article highlights a very interesting issue: Beer distribution is a sector that will be highly affected by a supply chain disruption…in the UK. You could even say that beer distribution is part of the UK critical infrastructure. At least, that’s the impression I have after reading McKinnon, Alan (2006). Life Without Trucks: The Impact of a Temporary Disruption of Road Freight Transport on a National Economy. Seriously, the article is about so much more. It shows how dependent our Just-In-Time-society has become on road transport, and what sectors that are most dependent on road transport. Transportation disruption should thus be part of any business continuity plan.

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Black Swan Events

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Black Swan events – should we even bother? The October issue of the Harvard Business Review had a special spotlight on risk, and featured an article by Nassim M Taleb, Daniel G Goldstein and Mark W Spitznagel on The Six Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management. The article discusses the so-called Black Swan events or Low Probability High Impact events, and the fact that these events are practically impossible to predict, so instead of spending our efforts on quantifying and estimating them, maybe we should just let them happen and rather focus on reducing our vulnerability to them (if they do happen). A very interesting thought…

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Graph Theory to the rescue

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Graph Theory. In Supply Chain Management? It’s probably 10 years ago since last time I looked at Graph Theory. That was when I was writing my thesis for my MSc in GIS on Network Analysis in Raster GIS, and while I know that Graph Theory has many applications, I never expected to see it in Supply Chain Management. Now, Stephan M. Wagner and Nikrouz Neshat are using it in their 2009 paper Assessing the vulnerability of supply chains using graph theory. That is a novel approach, but does it work?

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Supply Chain Flexibility in Strategic Networks

Revised on: 2015-09-03

A supply chain as a virtual enterprise network. That is the underlying reasoning in the 2009 paper How to improve supply chain flexibility using strategic supply chain networks by Herwig Winkler. Virtual Enterprise Networks do not play a major role in this paper, but what fascinates me are (1) the parameters defining supply chain flexibility: Transparency, Simplicity, Responsiveness/Agility and Security/Reliability, and (2) flexibility potentials: Structural, Technological and Human flexibility potentials.

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Rigorous Risk Management

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

As a global management consulting firm, A.T. Kearney is focusing on strategic and operational CEO-agenda concerns, and leading startegists at AT Kearney often have articles appearing in Supply Chain Mangement Review (SCMR). Today I will take a closer look at Bringing Rigor to Risk Management, written by Kish Khemani in 2007. Risk management is emerging as a key focus area for corporations, especially in terms of the extended supply chain and Bringing Rigor to Risk Management is a very brief and concise 2-page article, but it manages to highlight the key points that are important in managing supply chain risk. Why is managing supply chain risk important? As they take on expanded responsibilities for global sourcing, supply chain managers are also increasingly required to manage risk in terms of brand, reputation, and ethical sourcing, not just procurement and purchasing risks. In other words, supply chain risk management is increasingly becoming overall enterprise risk management.

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Supply chain risk in turbulent environments

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

An intriguing title caught my eye today. Supply chain risk in turbulent environments – A conceptual model for managing supply chain network risk by Peter Trkman and Kevin Mc Cormack. This is the first time I have encountered the term turbulent environments in my research on supply chain risk, so I decided to take a closer look at it. What is it really…simply old wine in new bottles or something profoundly new?

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