Supply Chain Risk. Business Continuity. Transport Vulnerability. Resilience. Articles and papers. Books and book chapters. Reports and whitepapers. And more.
Category Archives: THIS and THAT
Posts inspired by whatever else I find interesting
This has truly been a year of continuous supply chain disruptions, and many businesses have felt the effects of the pandemic. While the threat of a worldwide pandemic has been on the shortlist of potential risks of business continuity professionals, not many of us thought we would ever experience what we did in 2020. Given these circumstances, and add to that a dash or two of Brexit, I realize now that I should have seized the opportunity long ago to reinstate this blog in the early months of 2020, not now, when it it is nearly over and all the lessons have been learned.
For all of us working in the field of risk management the Covid-19-pandemic did not come as a surprise, and it certainly wasn’t a Black Swan event. Nassim Nicholas Taleb had that one right, when the New Yorker interviewed him in April 2021.
Proliferating global networks, both physical and virtual, inevitably incorporate more fat-tail risks into a more interdependent and “fragile” system: not only risks such as pathogens but also computer viruses, or the hacking of information networks, or reckless budgetary management by financial institutions or state governments, or spectacular acts of terror. Any negative event along these lines can create a rolling, widening collapse—a true black swan—in the same way that the failure of a single transformer can collapse an electricity grid.
Fragility…a familiar term, and the core of Taleb’s message. I found that New Yorker article by chance this evening when searching the Internet for inspirational posts to start blogging again. And yes, I do feel inspred now. Maybe not so much by the article, but by Taleb himself. Looking back at what I wrote five years ago in Taleb, Hamel, Holling…and I, I know that I felt honoured to have been so prominently cited by him. I still do.
With that it is time to delve deeper into my the research idea and my then defintions of robustness, flexibility and resilience and explre how I have made use of it in my current work. That will be the topic of the coming blog posts.
After a five-year hiatus, husdal.com will go live again very soon! This site has been dormant for more than five years now. Am I going to revive it? Yes I will! In the very near future. Stay tuned.
You Can’t Understand China’s Slowdown Without Understanding Supply Chains. That’s the title of a recent article written by David Simchi-Levi, the author of Operations Rules that I reviewed on this blog some time ago. Simchi-Levi believes that the slowdown is due, in part, to an acceleration of “near-shoring,” the practice of producing closer to the customer, and not as many economists would say, due to a looming economic crisis in China. That is an interesting point of view.
Bringing supply chains home
Is everything still “Made in China”? According to Simchi-Levi, the answer is No. An increasing number of companies are sourcing and producing nearer and nearer to their markets, in an effort to better manage their supply chain risks:
Global companies have realized in the last few years that strategies such as outsourcing and off-shoring have significantly increased risk because their supply chain is geographically more diverse and, as a result, exposed to all sorts of potential problems. A recent example is the explosion at a warehouse in Tianjin that ships hazardous materials, which was most likely caused by a company culture that flouted regulations. This drives companies to reevaluate their supplier and manufacturing base in order to increase flexibility and reduce risk.
The current turmoil in China will most likely accelerate the trend to near-shoring, but the impact will vary by specific industry and company.
For high tech industries (e.g., the manufacture of laptop computers and mobile phones) recreating the infrastructure in China somewhere else would be expensive and difficult to do. In contrast, it will be easier for footwear and apparel companies to move to lower-cost locations. Manufacturers of heavy products such as appliances or cars that are heavily influenced by shipment costs may find it pays to move production closer to market demand.
The bottom line: Companies need to evaluate on an ongoing basis whether the trade-offs for their particular industry have shifted enough to justify a change in their sourcing strategies.
This reminds me of a post I made in 2010, Outsourcing – Risking it all? reflecting on an article and a presentation made by Jack Barry ten years ago, where he raises some fundamental concerns about the then current trend towards global outsourcing and its consequences. Yes, it may be cutting the costs, but it is not cutting the risks.
In Global Risk: Outsourcing Services, A New Aesop’s Fable of the Ant and the Termite, a presentation he made to the Institute for Supply Management, ISM, he reviewed his article and his thoughts behind it. If I summarise some of his slides, he said
The benefits of globalisation:
India develops my software
Ireland manages my customer service
Taiwan does my testing
Mexico performs piece labor
Germany balances my finances
Israel does my clinical research
… my supply sources are global.
>>> I have the lowest overall cost of services
The risks of globalization:
India owns my IT process and innovation
Ireland is between me and my customers
Taiwan controls my quality control
Mexico dominates my capacity curve
Germany leverages my finances
Israel has first views of my innovation
… my supply sources may be beyond my laws and conventions.
>>> I have the highest level of risk to continued operations
I guess what Barry said back then isn’t any less valid today, and you can find the full presentation for download below.
My own conclusion is that in the same way that cost-cutting is what lead companies to pursue outsourcing and offshoring in the past, risk-cutting is what now may now lead companies into sourcing and producing their goods nearer to their markets, because in sum it is less risky AND less costly. As long as labour cost and production costs were low, along with minimal logistics cost per unit, due to the sheer volume of goods that were shipped around the globe, offshoring and outsourcing made sense, but it also made supply chain risk less controllable. That realisation is perhaps finally sinking in.
Reference
Simchi-Levi, D. (2015) You Can’t Understand China’s Slowdown Without Understanding Supply Chains. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 2015-10-02 from https://hbr.org/2015/09/you-cant-understand-chinas-slowdown-without-understanding-supply-chains
Barry, J. (2004). Supply chain risk in an uncertain global supply chain environment International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 34 (9), 695-697 DOI:10.1108/09600030410567469
ISCRIM – 4 years ago it was a very big part of this blog. Unfortunately, after leaving the academic world of supply chain risk for a practitioner job in transport vulnerability, I lost touch with perhaps the main contributing source for not few of blog posts. However, attending a university course in road safety management recently rekindled my academic vibes, and even revived my interest in my husdal.com blog which had been withering along for the last three years or so. And now I have returned back to the fold, so to speak.
ISCRIM
My involvment in ISCRIM started in 2010 and the International Supply Chain Risk Management Network (ISCRIM) is a network of researchers and practitioners engaged in analyzing, developing and disseminating evidence and good practices associated with managing supply chains and their associated risks. Founded in 2001 by a handful of active researchers in this at that time still fledging field of research, it has now grown into a network of 35 researchers and practitioners in Europe and the US, and I am glad to once again being a direct part of it.
Dissemination
ISCRIM holds an annual research seminar and issues a newsletter to be found on their website once or twice every year highlighting the latest research in supply chain risk:
Journal articles, research papers, conference presentations, PhD theses, books and book chapters
Coming conferences and seminars
Weblinks
The newsletter is a bit of who’s who, who does what, where should you go, and where can you find more on the subject of supply chain risk. If you’re new to supply chain risk, the newsletter is the best place to start and if you’re deeply involved with supply chain risk, work-wise, research-wise or otherwise, the newsletter is the best place to stay on top of what’s going on.
Catching up
Now that I have linked up with ISCRIM again, I realise that I have missed out on a great deal of very interesting and promising research. So there’s a whole lot of catching up to do, going through every newsletter since 2012 to see which paper I would like to present on this blog. There’s so much that I don’t even know where to start and I’m glad to see new names and never heard of research topics in journal articles, which will fill this blog with new content in due time.
Looking back…looking forward
I attended the ISCRIM seminar in 2010, meeting so many interesting researchers, hearing about so many interesting topics and basically really enjoying myself surrounded by supply chain risk on all sides. Since there weren’t any other with similar interests at my research institute back then, That was a whole new experience to me, and I guess that’s one of the reasons for quitting that job, because, in the end, I was rather alone in my special field.
In my current job as a Resilience Adviser I have a national network of 5-10 people I can share and discuss my views on transport vulnerability with, and it dawned on me how important networks are, and that I should link up with ISCRIM once again. After all, I haven’t completely left supply chain risk territory; rather I’m like standing at the top of the pyramid in Helen Peck’s 2005 article on Reconciling supply chain vulnerability, risk and supply chain management, where she managed to draw a line from the ambiguous concept of risk in one company, through the supply chain, through extended networks and all the way up to society as a whole.
In my review of that article I concluded that
Supply chains link industries and economies more than we may be aware of, and the research agenda for supply chain risk and vulnerability needs to recognize that there are many and varied interests and communities involved. Consequently, and that is my view, too, research in supply chain risk and vulnerability is inclusive, rather than exclusive, of other fields.
In my case, given my current job, it’s probably more vice versa, I should not include other fields in supply chain risk, but rather include supply chain risk and vulnerability in the other field, i.e. what I do, namely resilience. I intend to do so, and being part of ISCRIM goes a long way in achieving that. After all, meeting and becoming part of ISCRIM has done a lot to keep my academic spirit going. Besides, as I understand it, membership is by merit, or invitation and recommendation only, so it is a bestowed privilege that I should not waste.
Ever since I started to work for the Southern Region office of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (Statens vegvesen Region sør) three years ago I haven’t been able to come up with a good job title in English. There simply isn’t any immediate equivalent in English to the Norwegian title that springs to mind, or that exists in a similar fashion in the English-speaking world. It was only after reading Erik Hollnagel’s definition of resilience that I finally realised that I am an Resilience Adviser.
Safety or security ?
Even in Norwegian it’s hard to explain to friends and family, and colleagues for that matter, what I actually do for a living. I am an adviser in “samfunnssikkerhet” as it is called in Norwegian. Finding the English equivalent hasn’t been easy, as I said, until I started studying the concept of resilience. So why does samfunnssikkerhet equal resilience?
Well, samfunn in Norwegian means society, sikkerhet can mean either safety or security in Norwegian since we do not have separate words for it. So samfunnssikkerhet can be societal security or societal safety, or both.
Samfunnssikerhet and Societal security
Societal securityis a concept developed by the Copenhagen School of security studies in the 1990s (Wikipedia). It refers to
the ability of a society to persist in its essential character under changing conditions and possible or actual threats
The standard definition for samfunnssikkerhet in Norway, set by a government commission in 2000 is
the ability of a society to maintain critical (essential) functions and the life, health and essential needs of its population under various forms of stress
The wording is perhaps not exactly the same, but both definitions emphasize “essential”, and in my view social security as the English translation captures what samfunnssikkerhet is all about.
Societal security as the English translation of the Norwegian samfunnssikkerhet has been used in particular by Jan Hovden from SINTEF,the research intstitute of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU. He even wrote an English paper on the subject in 2004 titled Public policy and administration in a vulnerable society: regulatory reforms initiated by a Norwegian commission. I found and reviewed it on my blog 5 years ago: Risk society.
Societal security and safety – Resilience
What I found most brilliant about the paper was how he managed to merge the concept of societal safety and security. So safety is included in societal security, but is societal security then really the right word? I think perhaps.
Samfunnssikkerhet and Societal safety
Societal safety as the translation of samfunnssikkerhet is mostly used by SEROS, the Centre for Risk Management and Societal Safety, a research centre with the University of Stavanger, UiS. They describe social safety as cross-disciplinary theory and methods for social planning, emergency preparedness, crisis management, safety management, risk perception and risk communication.
UiS offers BSc, MSc and PhD in samfunnssikkerhet or what they in English call Risk Management and Societal Safety, and societal safety is then the term that is most likely to be widely used for samfunnssikkerhet in the future. Is that the right word? I don’t think so.
Samfunnssikkerhet and Resilience
While societal security or societal safety are no too bad translations of samfunnssikkerhet that do make sense in English, I’m not so sure they capture the essence of samfunnssikkerhet.That is why I am strongly in favor of resilience. As Hollnagel puts it, resilience is
the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions
If you think of society as a system and if you replace required with essential in this definition, or if you replace the words vice versa you pretty much have the same definition.
Meet the Resilience Adviser
In my view resilience would be a much better English word for the Norwegian samfunnssikkerhet, just look at Resilient Organisations in New Zealand. They have taken research on resilience in organisations (and society) to a whole new level and put it into practice, and I hope to spread and disseminate what they do in my own work, and thus contribute to spreading resilience thinking in Norway.
So I now call myself “Resilience Adviser”. And what do I do? My job is to oversee that the state-managed road network in my region is planned, built, operated and maintained so that it can function 24/7/365, and thus ensure societal safety and societal security, i.e. resilience.
The only problem now is that there is no good Norwegian word for the English word resilience…sigh…
Truckers caught up in Europe’s migrant crisis say business is increasingly disrupted by queues and stowaways, but they are far more worried governments will step up border controls. In a worst case scenario this could mean serious supply chain disruptions or supply chain delays if EU governments decide to make border crossings more difficult than today.
Schengen about to be scrapped?
Europe is currently facing a major migrant crisis, so severe that there is already a Wikipedia entry for European migrant crisis. While this is first and foremost a humanitarian issue, there could be potential supply chain consequences, as an article on euractiv.com reports, stating that Haulers fear migrant crisis:
Truckers caught up in Europe’s migrant crisis say business is increasingly disrupted by queues and stowaways, but they are far more worried governments will step up border controls.
If the border-free zone within Europe were to disintegrate or be scrapped, it would call into question not only the road haulage industry’s own, time-sensitive business model but the supply chains of industries across the continent, they say.
The article on euractiv.com paints a rather frightening picture of what could possibly happen if the worst hit EU countries decide to enforce stricter controls, let alone close their borders completely. That would bring us back to the days we still had passport checks, document controls, crosschecks, and all of this increasing the waiting time for border crossings to hours at best and days at worst.
The vulnerabilities of international supply chains will increase in the future, driven by various external hazards and risks, lean operational models as well as changes imposed by regulatory countermeasures. Companies are particularly concerned about future disruptions in material supply and transportation, which will have negative impact on just-in-time operations.
That post was written in 2011, and now, 4 years on, “the vulnerabilities of international supply chains” has definitely increased, albeit migrants were probably not the shortlist of possible future vulnerabilities at that time.
Hitting two birds with one stone? Can you shrink manufacturing costs while at the same time operate in an environmentally friendly manner? Veolia Environment thinks it’s possible, and that is why WTG is featuring Veolia in an upcoming webinar titled Environmentally Friendly Initiatives to Shrink Manufacturing Costs. This live and interactive session is set to show you how to combine sustainability excellence and cost reduction targets to better focus your environmental performance initiatives.
What will you learn?
Effective design, implementation and operation of environment-friendly initiatives in a meaningful and cost-effective way:
Activate environmental performance while reducing costs
Maximise efficiencies with waste, treatment and recovery initiatives
Sustain seamless and comparable quality of service in multiple locations
Set sustainability excellence and cost reduction targets (case study examples)
Case study examples will illustrate how Veolia Environnement helps industrial customers globally enlarge, improve and speed up manufacturing processes, while improving their environmental performance.
Finally, almost to the day six months into my new job, a genuinely new post on husdal.com. My new line of work has kept me so busy that I haven’t had much time to think about supply chain risk, let alone post about. Besides, my new job is all about business continuity and crisis management, and I haven’t even read a single article on supply chain risk since I came here, so if there is to be a new post, it has to be about crisis management. And frankly speaking, supply chain risk is probably going to be a very seldom topic on this blog from now on, unless popular demand wants it otherwise.
What is a crisis?
You see, part of my job at Southern Region office of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration is to develop and maintain crisis management plans. One of the important questions to ask when developing contingency plans is the question “When is does a situation turn into a crisis? When is a crisis really a crisis? What makes a crisis a crisis? For that I need to define the term crisis.
An “ordinary” contingency is not a crisis
Obviously, within the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (or Highways Agency in the UK) there are contingency plans for a wide range of unexpected situations such as accidents, heavy snowfall in winter, flash floods in summer to mention but a few. There are also detailed detour plans if this or that link is closed. These are what I call “ordinary contingencies” that happen every day so to speak and that do not warrant extraordinary attention.
An extraordinary contingency is a potential crisis
It is only when the ordinary contingency plans fail or when the ordinary contingency measures are not enough that we have potential crisis at our hands. Hence I came up with this definition of a crisis:
A crisis is a situation following an unwanted event that cannot be resolved through an organisation’s ordinary contingency efforts, but that requires a coordinated and extraordinary effort across all/many organisational units, and often additional assistance from external agents.
This definition is translated from Norwegian and my choice of words in English may not be perfect or to the point, but I hope it brings the message across.
When incidents turn into crises
Essentially, what the crisis definition says is that any eventuality that is not covered in a contingency plan can become a crisis, simply because one does not know what to to, since it is not planned for or prepared for. However, even eventualities that are covered can turn into crises, if they are not managed properly. And importantly, even if an eventuality is not covered it may not always turn into crisis, if it is managed as it should be, despite the lack of contingency plan guidance.
Do you agree/disagree?
I’d love to hear you opinion on my definition of crisis. lease comment below or contact me directly.
Operational Excellence or OpEx for short, what does that imply and why should you care about it? Well, if you don’t know it, here’s your chance to learn more: A webinar by WTG webinars, the leading provider of B2B educational online events. I’ve been a media partner with them for several years now, and from a humbling and fumbling start their webinars have evolved into do-not-miss-events that you should make time for. I always do. many of them, if not most, are also available for on-demand viewing.
Operational Excellence – key issues
The upcoming webinar on Top 5 OpEx Success Strategies will help you become more successful, using Lean and OpEx to enable and accelerate business growth, Presented by Simon Law, a former manufacturing leader of the Toyota Motor Manufacturing Corporation, who worked as a team leader responsible for delivering 600 vehicle bodies per shift to two assembly plants for 11 years, the webinar is centered around these topics:
Top 5 blunders that make OpEx failand how to avoid them
How to Integrate and deploy OpEx strategically for growth in earnings & sales
Why a comprehensive management system that shows improvements is key for sustaining results and cultural change
Understand how to develop the right culture and the way it impacts upon your business performance
Real examples of the tools and behaviours highly successful companies are using to enable cultural change and sustainability of OpEx and Lean
The Effective Lean Enterprise
Along with the webinar WTG in cooperation with TBM is also releasing a white paper on lean enterprises. As applicable to companies that are just starting out on their lean journey as it is to those that might be further along, this white paper (download below) reviews 10 best practices for establishing and growing a continuous improvement program or Kaizen in Japanese.
This is an event that should not be missed: The 4th supply chain risk managment seminar in Barcelona, 25th and 26th October 2012. This annual event has been featured on my blog since its first inception in 2009, and over the last 4 years, the seminar has provided many of the world’s leading organisations with a platform to find real “in-process” solutions to their specific Supply Chain Risk Management issues.
New format
This year they have reshaped the seminar to incorporate one full day dedicated to General Supply Chain Management issues and a second full day to Supply Chain Risk Management challenges. Will that make it an even greater success? I think so. It could be a sign that thye are running out of supply chain risk topic, but I chose to think that it’s a sign of greater integration of risk thinking into supply chain management thinking. That is perhaps also why they changed the name, it is the the Supply Chain and Supply Chain Risk Seminar.
Key Issues
Day 1 is devoted to Supply Chain Management, while Day 2 is devoted to Supply Chain Risk Management, albeit, looking at the program in more detail, Day 1 isn’t exactly void of any risk-related topics.
Supply Chain Management
Supply Chain Collaboration
Supply Chain Finance
Increasing Supply Chain Visibility and Flexibility
Demand-Driven Value Network
Reduce Supply Chain Complexity to improve SC Efficiency
How to manage supply chain complexity in today’s global volatility?
Delivering Sustainable Profitable Growth through the Supply Chain
Increase Upstream and Downstream Supply Chain Flexibility
Establishing Reliable Supply Chains
Measurement & Metrics & ROI
Supply Chain Risk Management
Loss Mitigation
Supplier Risk Assessment and Monitoring
Securing Global Supply Networks
New Models for Supply Chain Risk
Supply Chain Disruption: Japan´s Tsunami business case
The role of total cost analysis (design versus disruption) in effective supply chain risk strategies.
The role of supply chain risk management in global competitiveness
End-to-end Supply Chain Risk Management
Successful business case of SCRM implementation
Measurement & Metrics & ROI
As always, there is an impressive list of speakers, taken from a wide range of different industries.
Links
Official website: 4th Supply Chain & SC Risk Management Seminar Barcelona 2012
Celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2012, the European Transport Conference or ETC is unique in Europe, attracting many transport practitioners and researchers to an event where they can find in-depth presentations on policy issues, best practice and research findings across a broad spectrum of transport modes and particularly related to Europe and European transport issues. This year’s conference is held 10-12 October in Glasgow, Scotland, UK.
This is a conference that you shouldn’t miss if transport reliability and vulnerability is what interestes you: The 5th International Symposium on Transportation Network Reliability (INSTR), will be held in Hong Kong from December 18 to 19, 2012. The INSTR series is the premier gathering for the world’s leading researchers and professionals interested in transportation network reliability, to discuss both recent research and future directions in this increasingly important field of research. The deadline for submitting abstracts is 30 January 2012, so there is still time to draft something and submit a full paper when due later.
In a previous post on the Retail SCM Summit 2011 I mentioned that China as a rising economic powerhouse and on its way to become the world’s second largest consumer market after the United States. With a large population of fashion and brand conscious consumers increasing their spending as their incomes rise, the consumer retail market in China is expected to continue to grow, opening up huge opportunities for European and US retail stores that may be considering expanding into the Chinese market. While the upside is obvious, the pitfalls and hurdles are not, and that is the topic of Retail Operations in China: Capturing the Opportunity and Managing the Risk, a webinar hosted by US-based law firm Mintz Levin and scheduled for September 19 at 1pm EST.
Hosted by news anchor Becky Anderson, the CNN Gateway is a series that goes behind the scenes of the world’s major transport hubs, revealing the logistics that keep goods and people moving. We may not always give it much thought, but suply chains are all around us, and logistics is what makes the world tick. Our global world would not be possible without these hubs, the technology they emply and the people who work there. Even if you consider yourself fairly knowledgable in logistics and supply chain management, I bet there are still new things to learn from watching this series, and this post will present some of the highlights.
Are you looking for the latest in supply chain risk research? Usually, newsletters from the International Supply Chain Risk Management Network (ISCRiM) are the place to find it, and finally, here’s the first and hopefully not the only newsletter for 2011, like in 2010, when there was only one. The ISCRiM Newsletter is filled to the brim with exciting news about journal articles, books and book chapters published by the ISCRiM members, conference papers, conferences to be held that have supply chain risk in their program, research reports and dissertations/theses that deal with supply chain risk, Internet links and useful websites that a researcher in supply chain risk ought to be aware of. It’s a who’s who and what’s what in supply chain risk management. Continue reading →
China. Perhaps the biggest arena for future development in logistics and supply chain management? It could be, because China is a rising economic powerhouse and on its way to become the world’s second largest consumer market after the United States. This means that domestic supply chains will be as if not even more important to China than international supply chains. With the government putting high priority on boosting domestic consumption, Chinese retailers need to understand and be able to cater to the increasingly sophisticated Chinese consumer. This is the backdrop for the Retail Supply Chain Management Summit 2011, hosted by the Global Leaders Institute in Shanghai, China on December 6 & 7, 2011, with the support of Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) and China Logistics Association (CLA).
What do businesses in Scandinavia fear the most? That is what Nordic insurance giant If Insurance decided to find out. So they asked 400 managers in major companies in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland the question “What kind of risk or threat do you think that publicly listed companies in your country fear the most today?” The answer may surprise you…or maybe not, and interestingly, what is most on managers’ minds is very different from country to country. Supply chain risks do not rank very high. Actually, unless you count them in implicitly, they do not rank at all…almost. But what do business leaders in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland fear the most?
Normally, when finding topics for this blog, it is I who have to seek out and find the established or ongoing research that I want to promote. Occasionally, ongoing research finds me and asks for help in spreading the word, and most of the time I am more than happy to oblige. This time it is Peter Trkman and Kevin McCormack, whose research on supply chain turbulence was featured on this blog some 6 months ago. Together with Marcos Paulo Valadares de Oliveira they are currently researching how risk management practices can add value to the organization, what the modifying effects of turbulence are, and what risk management orientation companies subscribe to. For this they are conducting a survey, and asked for my help in increasing the number of respondents by advertising their survey on my blog.
Finally, here it is, the 3rd Supply Chain Risk Management Seminar 2011 to be held in Barcelona, Spain, 26-27th October this year. Ever since I first blogged about the very first seminar in 2008, I have eagerly awaited the annual conference announcements, so that I could promote it here on husdal.com. This year’s program is still in the making but some topics and speakers are already out. With Supply cost and performance risk as a result of deteriorating freight transportation infrastructure as one of the topics, a topic that is very close to my heart, it looks like a seminar I would really like to attend. But there are a lot more reasons for going to Barcelona this year than just that one topic.
Financial key performance indicators are valuable because they capture the economic consequences of business decisions. Many of these business decisions are made as supply chain decisions, but many supply chain managers are perhaps not fully aware of how the supply chain metrics they juggle in their day to day operations impact the overall financial performance of they company they work in or work for, say, in the case of 3PL outsourcing. That is the topic of Linking Supply Chain Performance to a Firm’s Financial Performance, a recent article in the Supply Chain Management Review, where Priscilla Wisner, distinguished lecturer at the University of Tennessee, describes the “language of business” and how supply chain mangers can link their performance measure to business performance measures.
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