Tag Archives: global supply chains

Next time in China: Guanxi

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Today’s post is an extension of what I wrote yesterday, in my review of what Fu Jia and Christine Rutherford wrote in Mitigation of supply chain relational risk caused by cultural differences between China and the West, an article that is very much based on Fu Jia’s PhD, Cultural adaptation between Western buyers and Chinese suppliers, where he describes nine important types of cultural differences that Westerners need to be aware of when doing business in China. If you ignore these differences, your business ventures in China, or in much of Asia for that matter, are destined to fail miserably. Today I will present these differences in more detail.

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Supply Chain Risk: Culture Shock

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Is culture shock the reason why so many global and cross-culture business relationships fail? When it comes to Western buyers and Chinese suppliers this may very well be the case, and while issues related to product quality or supplier reliability may seem as the obvious cause externally, cultural differences may be the root cause internally. Fu Jia and Christine Rutherford from Cranfield University have just published an article on Mitigation of supply chain relational risk caused by cultural differences between China and the West, where they claim that the extent of cultural adaptation between supplier and buyer is what makes or brakes global partnerships that are culturally different.

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Supply chain vulnerability: Mitigation strategies

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Revised on: 2015-09-08

A new outlet for articles on supply chain vulnerability? Perhaps. And actually, it’s not that new, since the journal has been in existence for some 16 years, but I haven’t come across the Journal of Marketing Channels as a source for papers on supply chain disruption before. That is why I was so surprised to find Sources of Supply Chain Disruptions, Factors That Breed Vulnerability, and Mitigating Strategies by Karen E Stecke and Sanjay Kumar. Here they develop a classification framework for supply chain catastrophes and the appropriate mitigation strategies for the various types of smaller and bigger supply chain disasters that can occur.

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Business Continuity in Global Supply Chains

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Revised on: 2011-02-17

Business Continuity is a crucial ingredient of supply chain management. At the same time, implementing business continuity principles in supply chains is really simple. So says Steve Cartland in his book chapter on Business Continuity Challenges in Global Supply Chains in the book titled Global Integrated Supply Chain Systems, published in 2006. Cartland’s chapter is the last of the 19 chapters in the book, and the only chapter touching upon business continuity. Unfortunately. I think this chapter should have been first.

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Less cost and less disruptions?

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Revised on: 2015-11-07

One of the regular readers of my blog alerted me to an article in the NY Times titled Slow Trip Across Sea Aids Profit and Environment. As it turns out the Danish shipping giant Maersk has halved its top cruising speed over the last two years, thus cutting fuel costs, cutting emissions and perhaps cutting disruptions costs, too? After all, if you know that your shipment will arrive late, you are perhaps less concerned with not being just in time?

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Supply Chain Risk: Invasive Species

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

With 90% of world trade carried by sea, the global network of ships criss-crossing the oceans provide perhaps the most important mode of transportation, not only for human mobility and for the exchange of goods, but also for the spread of invasive species that “hitch-hike” with these ships, particularly in the ballast tanks. These invasive species carried along these global shipping lanes are perhaps not so much a risk to the supply chain, but a risk stemming from the supply chain. In order to find out how these species travel and where they come from, in The complex network of global cargo ship movements, a team from Germany has mapped the worldwide movements in the maritime shipping network.

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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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Risk Management in Global Supply Chain Networks

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Supply Chain Risks can be classified as either one of these three, Deviation, Disruption or Disaster, and can be approached using either a Preventive or an Interceptive approach; the former attempts to build in risk tolerance, the latter attempts to contain the damage or impact of an undesired event. So say N Visvanadham and Roshan S Gaonkar in Risk Management in Global Supply Chain Networks, a chapter in the 2008 book Supply Chain Analysis, edited, among others, by Christopher S Tang. Using this framework, the authors develop a simple integer quadratic optimization model that optimizes partner selection and minimizes operational cost variability.

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The Box is back!

Revised on: 2011-03-22

Finally, the BBC Box has returned home, as I was made aware of from a post on @risk the other day. I had near forgotten about this project. A year ago I made a post on the BBC project “The Box”, where BBC News is following a shipping container for a whole year to tell the story of globalisation. The Box is back where it started, and what a voyage it has been, since the voyage coincided with some of the most dramatic developments in the global economy including the first global recession in 60 years.

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Book Review: Single Point of Failure

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Just out a few days ago, Single Point of Failure is a fascinating read. The author, Gary S. Lynch, is Global Leader, Supply Chain Risk Management Practice at Marsh Consulting, so he knows what he is talking about. The book’s tagline reads “The 10 Essential Laws of Supply Chain Risk Management” and what Gary Lynch is trying to convey is that there are certain basics every manager should know, understand, and act upon. Lynch breaks down Supply Chain Management into ten basic laws, neither founded in academic theories or mathematical formulas, but simple basic principles that anyone can appreciate.

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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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What’s so special about this Paul Kleindorfer?

Revised on: 2015-09-08

Apparently there must be something really special about Paul Kleindorfer. Otherwise there would be no reason for Morris A Cohen and Howard Kunreuther to write their tribute to him in their 2007 article Operations Risk Management: Overview of Paul Kleindorfer’s Contributions. But what is it that makes Paul Kleindorfer so interesting that it compelled these two authors to write a whole article about him?

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Book Review: Global Supply Chain Management

Revised on: 2015-09-11

The Handbook of Global Supply Chain Management is an excellent book. My interest in it stems from the fact that it contains a chapter on risk management. It was after reading Manuj and Mentzer’s articles on Global Supply Chain Risk Management and Global Supply Chain Risk Management Strategies that I came across this book, when searching for more papers from Mentzer and/or Manuj, and naturally, I decided to see if there was something on supply chain risk in it. There was.

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Lean + Agile = LeAgile: a happy marriage?

Revised on: 2015-09-11

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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Lean logistics = risky logistics?

Revised on: 2015-09-11

A posting on Evolving Excellence called Long is not Lean caught my attention the other day. The author was lamenting over an article in Logistics Management that talked at length about the Downside of Lean Logistics and how lean means a supply chain that is more prone to risks and disruptions. Naturally, since Evolving Excellence is all about “Thoughts on Lean Enterprise Leadership”, of course they stood up for lean and defended it vigorously, and thinking about it, I have to agree that it is true, a lean supply chain is not necessarily a risky supply chain.

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Global supply chain risk management strategies

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

A case of mistaken identity, or so I thought, but it’s not. There are in fact two separate articles, by the same authors, Manuj and Mentzer, with almost the same title, published the same year, 2008, in two different journals. Previously, I have reviewed Global Supply Chain Risk Management by Manuj and Mentzer, so when I first came across this second article in the reference list of a paper I simply thought it to be some “copy-and-paste”-work on the same topic, slightly tweaked and edited, and published in a different journal, just for the sake of boosting the authors’ publication record. How wrong of me. Global Supply Chain Risk Management Strategies by Ila Manuj and John T Mentzer IS indeed a different article, and it’s even better than the first one.

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The BBC box

Revised on: 2011-03-22

I usually watch the BBC World Business Report every morning and today I learned that BBC News is following a shipping container for a whole year to tell the story of globalisation. Actually, the container has been enroute since September last year, but today was the first time I heard of it. Not so much related maybe to Supply Chain Risk, but still an interesting gimmick, showing how interconnected global trade has become, and the difficulties and challenges a shipment has to face along the way

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Airports – vital to supply chains?

Revised on: 2011-03-29

Is the temporary shut-down of Bangkok’s two international airports important in a supply chain perspective? So far, the issue has been stranded tourists, maybe as many as 100000. Now it’s also becoming a major headache for the tourist industry and subsequently for Thailand’s national economy, loosing as much as $85 million per day, according to the BBC News. Not only that, air freight will also be impacted, but why is this important?
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Strategies for managing risk in multinational corporations

Revised on: 2015-09-03

In my post two days ago, reviewing the article by Manuj and Mentzer (2008) titled Global Supply Chain Risk Management, I mentioned that they cited a paper by Ghoshal (1987) titled Global Strategy: An Organizing Framework as one of their references for listing risk management strategies. Today, I will take a closer look at that paper. The word “supply chain” doesn’t even appear once in Ghoshal’s paper, but why is this paper so interesting in a supply chain risk perspective?

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Global Supply Chain Risk Management

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Finally it appears that someone has developed an easy, hands-on, not-so-academic and straightforward approach to global supply chain risk management: Global Supply Chain Risk Management by Ila Manuj and John T Mentzer. When I say finally, it is because it is not often that I come across papers that have fully grasped the concept of supply chain risk management and made it look so easy at the same time. In their very recent paper they develop a global supply chain framework and a five-step approach for global supply chain risk management and mitigation.

Postscript: As I later discovered, there are in fact two separate articles, by the same authors, Ila Manuj and John T. Mentzer, with almost the same title, published the same year, 2008, in two different journals. Click here for Global Supply Chain Risk Management Strategies by Manuj and Mentzer.

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