Tag Archives: Towill Dennis

Shrink Shrank Shrunk

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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Lean + Agile = LeAgile: a happy marriage?

Opposites attract and in the supply chain world, “lean” and “agile” appear to be opposites. Both management strategies have their advantages and disadvantages, and the question is, is it possible for them to exist side by side, or even fuse?  In their 2006 article A taxonomy for selecting global supply chain strategies, Christopher, Peck and Towill describe a fusion of Lean and Agile, termed LeAgile.

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