Category Archives: THIS and THAT

Posts inspired by whatever else I find interesting

Another volcanic ash cloud crisis?

Revised on: 2015-09-10

Rewind your thoughts one year: Iceland. Volcano eruption. Air travel. Then look at today’s news. Are we facing yet another volcanic ash cloud crisis? It would seem so, as airlines have already begun cancelling flights in and out of Northern Europe, including Scotland. The big question is, have we learned last year’s lessons or will this be another scramble to the rescue sort crisis management? So, what did happen last year, and what did travellers do? That is what the Norwegian Institute of Transport Economics investigated and wrote up in a report called Air travel disruption after the volcano eruption in Iceland – Consequences for Norwegian travellers and businesses in Norway, published in late 2010. While the report is written in Norwegian, there is a three-page English summary, from which much of this post content is taken.

Continue reading →

Customs Research meets Customs Practice

Revised on: 2011-08-01

Customs. A real hassle and a nuisance at times, but also a necessary evil in international trade. “Evil” is perhaps the wrong word here, although having been questioned by customs officers at Melbourne airport once, playing the Devil’s Advocate seemed to be their favorite game, so evil isn’t that wrong, as far as my experience goes. Anyway, every global supply chain must at some point cross some border and that is where customs comes into play. You might think that customs is not much of a field for academic research, but in fact it is, and every year since 2006 the World Customs Organization WCO has held a conference where practice and theory can meet. The WCO Partnership In Customs Academic Research and Development Conference 2011 or PICARD Conference 2011 will be in Switzerland Geneva, 14-16 September, with a focus on these four issues: Co-ordinated Border Management, Performance measurement of Customs, Economic security and poverty reduction, and Integrity.

Continue reading →

Global Risk and Compliance – Are you protected?

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Trade Compliance and Export Control are not just buzzwords in global supply chain. They represent significant risks. Breach of trade rules and regulations can have serious ramifications for businesses, ranging from mere fines to loss of contract, not to mention loss of reputation, and even bankruptcy if the breach should result in long-lasting and costly legal litigations. Consequently, knowing the risks and their impacts is important for any company involved in global trade and that is the topic of the latest webinar by WTG, Global Risk and Compliance – Are you protected?, presented by Neill Cooke, Ethics and Compliance Manager at UK-based IMI plc. Using practical examples, this webinar will outline various risks and their consequences for international companies, and I for one look forward to listening and watching this webinar.
Continue reading →

Supply Chain Risk Management Survey

2 Replies

Revised on: 2011-05-17

Effective Supply Chain Risk Management has become one of the key ways of securing competitive advantages for companies. Many students are trying to understand more about it and researching it, and based on the comments and feedback I receive on this site, many students (but also industry professionals and researchers) have found this blog a very helpful resource in their daily line of work. Today’s post is a favor towards Mrunal Korde, a MSc in Logistics and Supply Chain student at Curtin Singapore. Mrunal contacted me the other day, asking for suggestions where to post a survey on supply chain risk management that he was doing as part of his studies, and after some correspondence I agreed to help him in promoting the survey on this blog.

Continue reading →

Point merge – the latest in aviation logistics

2 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-12

I’ve been travelling this week, which is why there haven’t been any posts for a while, and on my trip I experienced first hand the latest innovation in aviation logistics: Point Merge when approaching the destination airport. Aviation logistics is perhaps the wrong term as it is more correct to say the latest innovation in air traffic control, namely the sequencing of incoming and outgoing aircraft. Oslo airport in Norway was the first in the world to try out this new system, of course on the very day I was travelling. Apart from causing a great deal of delays and cancellations (and passenger frustrations) due to heavy restrictions on the number of aircraft movements allowed during the initial phases of this new system I can’t help but think about how nice it would be if all logistics or supply chain management issues were this easy to solve, at least on paper.

Continue reading →

Trade compliance risks

Revised on: 2011-09-09

Although “German” traffic from countries like Germany, Austria and Switzerland make up less than 10% of my visitors, I still feel compelled to promote this webinar that will air on 19 April 2011, not only because I myself am fluent in German, but also because it relates directly to my blog topic and to some of my previous posts. In Management von Trade Compliance und Exportkontrollrisiken Innerhalb Einer Internationalen Supply Chain or Managing Trade Compliance and Export Risks in Global Supply Chains, as I would translate it, Torsten Röser and Thomas Kofler take a closer look at the risks and pitfalls involved in trading across borders, and in particular how non-compliance with trade and regulations can severely hamper supply chain operations.

Continue reading →

Extreme Weather Hazards and Transportation Vulnerability

Revised on: 2011-03-29

Weather Extremes: Assessment of Impacts on Transport Systems and Hazards for European Regions. That is the formal title of the WEATHER project, a project that is funded through the 7th framework program of the European Union and undertaken by a consortium of 8 partner institutions, lead by the Fraunhofer-Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI) in Karlsruhe, Germany. The WEATHER project aims at analysing the economic costs of more frequent and more extreme weather events on transport and on the wider economy and explores adaptation strategies for reducing them in the context of sustainable policy design. The project has been running since 2009 and perhaps it is now time to look at some of their deliverables and what has been delivered so far?

Continue reading →

Time is precious

6 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-30

Time. A highly valued asset in much of supply chain management and logistics operations. Time matters. Too little time due to delayed deliveries or late arrivals can cause havoc and supply chain disruptions, too much time due to production slack or early arrivals are equally annoying. Time is important and a supply chain works best when it is on time. For passenger trains it is definitely imperative to be on time and in 1944, Hans Hilfiker (1901-1993), a Swiss engineer and designer and employee of the Federal Swiss Railways, created a clock, which has since become known as the “Official Swiss Railways Clock”. This clock is a Swiss a national icon. It ensures that all trains run on time and that all stations show exactly the same time. This is the story of how the clock came about and what it means to me.

Continue reading →

How Effective Pallet Management Can Benefit the Full Supply Chain

2 Replies

Revised on: 2011-03-04

One seemingly small link in the supply chain of goods is pallets; those little timber crates on which most goods are secured for movement and handling. However, despite their relatively small role, they are ever-present, which means changing the way we think about them and how we use them can have a massive knock on effect to the whole supply chain due to their sheer numbers. Without pallets, very few supply chains can function effectively, but pallets can also be a supply chain trouble spot. So what problems do pallets cause for the supply chain? This can be broken down into four main areas; their associated costs; their safety and hygiene; their ease of use and their environmental impact. Addressing, or at least reducing, these areas could have benefits that could be felt all the way down the supply chain. How?

Continue reading →

Food commodity supply chains at risk?

2 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-12

Have the prices gone up at your local supermarket recently? Maybe your favorite chocolate is suddenly a lot more expensive? Do you wonder why? You may not think much about it, but the bigger picture that lays behind is grim-looking, to say the least: Cocoa trading at a one-year high, coffee trading a 13-year high, sugar trading at a 30-year high…ouch! I didn’t know there were such fluctuations in the raw material prices of the staples that go into so many of today’s foods, and if these prices continue to go up, that will definitely feed through the entire food supply chain, let alone the economy. Is cheap food and cheap energy perhaps a thing of the past and a time gone by?

Continue reading →

Christchurch earthquake…again!?!

Revised on: 2011-03-22

Oh dear…another earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, less than 6 months after the previous disaster, and this time perhaps even more devastating. One thing for sure, this community is having its disaster plans, business continuity measures and its resilience (and resolve) tested to the full. I can only imagine what I must be like, seeing the previous recovery efforts shattered to pieces in a matter of seconds. Six months ago I wrote about the previous earthquake to hit Christchurch, now it is time for it again. While there isn’t much I can do personally from here, what I can do is dig up some of my older posts that deal with business continuity, emergency supply chains, disaster recovery and last, but not least, resilience.

Continue reading →

2010 – the year of catastrophe

Revised on: 2011-03-22

It’s Sunday and time for some weekend reflections, aka browsing the Internet for blogs and websites to indulge in and this is what I found: “In a world where almost every company relies on global supply chains and an international network of outsourced activities, a freak event many thousands of miles away can have a potentially devastating impact on business at home”. These are the opening words of a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, an article that paints 2010 as the year of the catastrophe, and the insurance company Swiss Re estimates that worldwide economic losses from natural catastrophes and man-made disasters reached $222 billion last year – more than triple the losses in 2009. This clearly underlines how critical it is that companies have a firm strategy in place to deal with the unexpected. As I discovered when digging into this article, the Wall Street Journal, not surprisingly, has a whole section devoted to corporate risk, and it is a section well worth studying.

Continue reading →

Wintry disruptions…again

7 Replies

Revised on: 2011-03-22

Winter has come early to Europe this year. Very early. While it is not unusual to have a prolonged cold spell in January or February in this neck of the woods, as we did last year, having it in November is rather uncommon. Snow has covered much of Europe that hasn’t seen snow in winter for years,with widespread ramifications for all sorts of transport. Traffic all over Europe as been hit hard, and many rail services in the UK rail have simply been cancelled, the BBC reports. This has truly been the coldest November on record, at least in Norway. Whatever happened to global warming? Are cold winters the new and coming supply chain risk?

Continue reading →

A crisis is NOT an opportunity

22 Replies

Revised on: 2015-09-22

Time to debunk one of biggest and most persistent myths that has plagued crisis management for more than sixty years, namely the Chinese sign for crisis. Contrary to popular belief in the West, it does NOT mean opportunity. Many will probably have heard that When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity. That is not true. While many linguists know that this is wrong, the myth has persisted to this day and will probably still persist in the future. Why? Because a crisis in fact can be interpreted as an opportunity. But it is not an opportunity because the Chinese thought or wrote so.

Continue reading →

Building the resilient supply chain

Revised on: 2011-03-17

Supply chain risk seems to be on everyone’s agenda these days, with one event after the other competing for spotlight attention. The Building a Resilient Supply Chain Summit, in New Orleans, 9-10 December 2010, is up next. This event, so the conference website says, is the must-attend event for senior supply chain executives looking to evolve their supply strategies to better respond to ever changing risks, market conditions and global compliance requirements. Well said, but that is not the reason why yours truly is promoting the event. My reason for blogging about it is the simple fact that they have an impressive list of related resources on the conference website: reports, articles, blogs (!), interviews and videos. Even if you’re not planning to attend the conference, then at least you should attend their website, which is full of valuable insights, some of which I will highlight in this post.

Continue reading →

In memoriam David Kaye

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Sad news. I don’t always keep up with the subjects of my reviews, and today I was very saddened to learn that David Kaye passed away more than a year ago. David Kaye was the author of Managing Risk and Resilience in the Supply Chain, a book I reviewed on this blog some 18 months ago. David Kaye was a leading author, lecturer, examiner and workshop leader on risk management and business continuity subjects. He guided a diverse range of companies and public sector organisations on risk related issues around the world. His book was a great inspiration to me when I read it and it will continue to be so in the future.

Continue reading →

It’s already happening…in Norway?

Revised on: 2015-09-12

The food supply chain. Did you know that 25% of the world’s food supply are lost because of spoilage during transportation? That’s what IBM claims in a commercial about how IBM is helping to build a smarter planet: “On a smarter planet, we can use tracking technology to track and trace our food as it makes its way through the supply chain from the farm to our table. IBM is helping companies all over the world monitor our food’s temperature, pinpoint contaminations faster, prevent spoilage, and ensure the safety of the food we eat. It’s already happening in places like Canada, Norway, and Vietnam.” My own Norway mentioned by IBM? I’ve got to see this…

Continue reading →

Supply Chain Risk Management Forum

Revised on: 2015-09-12

Is your supply chain risk keeping you up at night? Maybe it’s time to learn how risk management can improve business performance? For that you may want to consider attending the Supply Chain Risk Management Forum in Toronto, Canada on March 29, 2011. The conference is a follow-up on last year’s successful Strategic Supply Chain Management Forum, and in response to the positive feedback and suggestions of attendees and sponsors, this year’s one-day event is focused specifically on a current critical supply chain issue: supply chain risk.

Continue reading →

CPM 2010 East in NYC

Revised on: 2015-09-12

Behind this perhaps cryptic title (for some, but not for others, especially those in the BCM industry) is the Contingency Planning & Management Conference (CPM 2010 East) that is coming up November 3-4 in New York City. It offers a 2-day, 4-track advanced-level program taught by expert faculty in small, classroom settings. Joseph Bruno, Commissioner of the NYC Office of Emergency Management, will also be this year’s keynote speaker. I won’t be going there myself, but if you’ve never attended before and are interested in attending, through my contacts I am pleased to offer a special registration code that will save you $100 off the full conference rate.

Continue reading →

MITIP 2011 in Trondheim, Norway

Revised on: 2015-10-24

This conference is a bit on the sideline for the topic of this blog, but since I have promoted it both in 2009 and in 2010, and since I was on the scientific committee for both conferences, I think I should do so for 2011 also, particularly because it takes place on home turf. The 13th International Conference on The Modern Information Technology in the Innovation Processes of the Industrial Enterprises, or MITIP 2011 for short, will take place 22 June – 24 June 2011, in Trondheim, Norway. The main theme of this conference will be ICT enabled intelligent manufacturing and supply chains.

Continue reading →