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SC Design and Management

More than 500-page heavy and laden with examples, this book takes on a unique approach, and teaches you how the supply chain is an integrated part of any business, not something added to it to make the business work. The supply chain is the business; without it, there would be no business.

Posted in BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS


Blog Review: RiskCzar

This month’s blog is RISKCZAR’s BLOG by Trevor Levine, a blog that is based on his almost 20 years of experience in financial, operational and enterprise risk management (ERM), and process improvement. In other words, a heavy-weight risk champion, but it’s not heavy-weight reading.

Posted in BLOGS and WEBSITES


The Resilient Organization

What does it mean to be a resilient organization? Blending academic research and managerial insights this book provides a different look at resilience, where resilience is more than just the ability to meet adversity; resilience is an essential element of a company’s competitive advantage.

Posted in BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS


Managing supply chain risk

In September and October 2009 the Economist surveyed 500 executives with responsibility for risk management, and selected from companies across Asia-Pacific, North America and Europe, in order to understand how companies are being affected by supply-chain risk, and how they are responding to it.

Posted in REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS


Retail SCM Summit 2011

China is a rising economic powerhouse and on its way to become the world’s second largest consumer market after the United States. With the government putting high priority on boosting domestic consumption, Chinese retailers need to understand the increasingly sophisticated Chinese consumer.

Posted in THIS and THAT


Supply Chain and Transport Risk

In our quest for greater efficiency and greater choice, are we really developing robust global transport networks or simply building a house of cards? That is what the Supply Chain and Transport Risk Initiative, nested within the Risk Response Network of the World Economic Forum is trying to answer.

Posted in REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS


What are you afraid of?

What do businesses in Scandinavia fear the most? The answer may surprise you…or maybe not. 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.

Posted in THIS and THAT


Low Cost Country Sourcing

In this book, which is a more or less unabridged version of his dissertation, Holger Köhler not only presents a (new) system for the systematization of supply chain risks, he also develops a model for the factors that influence supplier risk and brings it together in a novel way that I haven’t seen before.

Posted in BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS


Incapsula versus CloudFlare

CloudFlare versus Incapsula: Website security reviewed. CloudFlare is for the masses. Incapsula is for business. I’m business, and I’m going for Incapsula. CloudFlare is for performance, Incapsula is for security. I’m more concerned with security, so I’m going for Incapsula.

Posted in my BLOGGING


Blog Review: Risk Containment

This month’s blog is a blog for anyone who works with or is exposed to risk, and is a blog full of personal insights, funny stories and profound wisdom with business and management insights told through a personal lens and seen in light of past and present events, coupled with a solid dose of risk understanding.

Posted in BLOGS and WEBSITES


SCM: Past, Present and Future

What has been written during a decade of academic research in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) field? A lot, obviously, but despite the considerable number of academic contributions, the literature is still very fragmented, and only examines one link of the chain, not the entire network.

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS


Disruptions in supply networks

Supply chain disturbances and supply chain disruptions. Not the same and very different from each other. The former can be managed and solved within an established supply chain, the latter often requires establishing a new supply network. Understanding this difference is crucially important.

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS


Supply Chain Risk Management Research

This is a well-researched and methodologically sound article, which brilliantly sums up the core topics and clusters of supply chain risk management of the past, the present, how they have developed since the early 1990s, and where SCRM may be headed to in the future. Maybe. Or maybe not.

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS


Stemming the rising tide

Written in 2008 and well before the global financial downturn had companies think of anything but supply chain risk, this study of 110 North American risk managers by Marsh found that only 35 percent considered their companies to be “moderately effective” at managing supply chain risk.

Posted in REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS


Supplier Risk Management

Value Generation through Supplier Risk Management is a survey that aims to explore the potential value of effective risk management in supplier relationships and to provide insight into the supplier risk management practices and attitudes of organizations across multiple industry segments.

Posted in THIS and THAT


3rd Supply Chain Risk Management Seminar 2011

It is now official: The 3rd Supply Chain Risk Management Seminar 2011 will be held in Barcelona, Spain, 26-27th October this year. This year’s program is still in the making but some topics and speakers are already out, and there are a lot of reasons for going to Barcelona this year.

Posted in THIS and THAT


Supply Chain Risk: Product Design Changes

Supply Chain Risk Management has emerged as an important source of competitive advantage and an effective method of reducing vulnerability in a supply chain. One vulnerability or risk that is often overlooked are product design changes to an already existing manufacturing process.

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS


Supply Chain Performance Metrics

Many 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 for.

Posted in THIS and THAT


Committed Americans and Trusting Germans

Obviously, selecting the right third-party logistics provider (3PL) for your supply chain is an important decision in supply chain risk management, but not every country decides in the same manner. While Americans focus on commitment, Germans appear to rely more on trust. Why is that?

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS


CloudFlare or CloudFront – who wins?

In blogging, page speed is important, and after two weeks of rigorous testing I can say that CloudFlare works better than Amazon CloudFront. More interestingly, W3 Super Cache in combination with CloudFlare is better than using W3 Total Cache and CloudFlare together.

Posted in my BLOGGING


ARTICLES and PAPERS
Catastrophic events in supply chains
After studying supply chain risk research for some time I have begun to realize that  much of the su[...]
Occupational hazards in supply chains
Material breakages and damages are not unknown incidents in supply chains, but material damage and o[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book Review: How Nature Works
How Nature works is a fascinating book. I first heard of the late Per Bak and his sandpile theories [...]
Book Review: Your Research Project
This book is a must-have for any serious student or budding research. Even if you consider yourself [...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
Vulnerable or valuable supply chain?
More than a year old now, but still holding not so few words of wisdom is the Pricewaterhouse Cooper[...]
ISO 28002 – Supply Chain Resilience
Have you heard of ISO 28002?  No? You should take note of this standard, because the ISO 28000 serie[...]