Blog Archives

The worst roads in the world’s richest country

It is not the planning authorities or the central government who decides infrastructure development in Norway, but the local politicians. To put it simple, what in the US is known as “pork barrel spending” is what rules many of Norway’s infrastructure development projects. Why?

Posted in THIS and THAT
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Less supply chain disruptions with vendor managed inventory?

How does a traditional supply chain compare to a vendor managed inventory supply chain when it comes to performance during disruptions?

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS
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Supply Chain Security – an overview and research agenda

The article claims to have found four approaches in the literature on how organizations approach supply chain security.

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Book Review: Supply Chain Risk

The primary purpose of this book is to collect and share various streams of research and trends in supply chain risk, predominantly from the ISCRIM (International Supply Chain Risk Management) network.

Posted in BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
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A Future Research Agenda for Supply Chain Risk

When Manuj and Mentzer (2008) wrote their article titled Global Supply Chain Risk Management, they used Ghoshal (1987) Global Strategy: An Organizing Framework for developing sources of risk and Jüttner, Peck and Christopher (2003) Supply Chain Risk Management: Outlining an Agenda for Future Research for developing risk mitigation strategies.

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Strategies for managing risk in multinational corporations

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.

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Avoid Supply Chain Breakdown – Tailored Risk Management

In Chopra and Sodhi (2004) ‘Managing Risk to Avoid Supply-Chain Breakdown’ the first key message is that some mitigation strategies may actually increase risk in some business areas, rather than reduce it.The second key message is that the cost of mitigating or building up a reserve must be balanced against the level of risk.

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS
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Ericsson versus Nokia – the now classic case of supply chain disruption

When faced with a supply chain disruption, proactive and reactive supply chain risk management can in fact make or break a company’s existence.

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS
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Inbound and outbound vulnerability

In ‘A conceptual framework of vulnerability in firms’ inbound and outbound logistics flows.’, Göran Svensson separates inbound and outbound flows, adds 2 categories of disturbance (quantitative and qualitative), and also adds 2 sources of disturbance (atomistic and holistic) create 4 vulnerability scenarios.

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS
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A conceptual framework for supply chain vulnerability

Separating the chaff from the wheat and diving straight into the essence of the paper, Svensson aligns his framework along two dimensions, categories of disturbance and sources of disturbance. He then divides the categories into either quantitative or qualitative disturbances. Sources of disturbance are either atomistic (direct) or holistic (indirect).

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Drivers of supply chain vulnerability

In her article Drivers of supply chain vulnerability: an integrated framework, Helen Peck identifies four drivers of supply chain vulnerability:Value stream, product or processes,Assets and infrastructure dependencies,Organizations and inter-organizational networks,The Environment.

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Finding the right location – minimizing disruption costs

Classical facility location models assume that once optimally located and set up, facilities will operate as planned, smoothly, and without interruption. In reality, though, operations seldom go as planned; interruptions, unscheduled downtime and failures occur every once in a while, with unplanned and unbudgeted disruption costs as a consequence.

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From the back room to the board room

Supply chain management used to be relegated to the logistics department of businesses and hardly thought of as matters concerning the top-level management. In his 2004 paper, Joseph L. Cavinato points out five sub-networs within the supply chain that need special attention:Physical – the actual movement of goods, shipping and warehousing
Finance, Information, Relations, Innovation.

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Accessibility Index – Transport Network Vulnerability

The starting point for this paper is the question of how to define and find critical locations in a transport network. A network node is vulnerable if loss or degradation of a small number of links diminishes the accessibility of the node. A network link is critical if loss or degradation of the links diminishes the accessibility of the network or of particular nodes

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How to Design Mitigation Capabilities

The severity of supply chain disruptions stems from supply chain design characteristics and supply chain mitigation capabilities: Supply Chain Design: supply chain density,supply chain complexity, node criticality. Supply Chain Mitigation Capability: recovery capability, warning capability.

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The difference between legal and illegal supply chains

Daniel Ekwall’s thesis combines theories from criminology with theories from logistics and supply chain management to examine cross-over points or antagonistic gateways between the legal and illegal logistics system from a supply chain perspective.

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An empirical investigation into supply chain vulnerability

Drivers of supply chain vulnerability are 1) supply-side risk 2) demand-side risk, 3) catastrophic risk. Sources of risk are a) customer dependence and b) supplier dependence, d) supplier concentration and d) single sourcing and e) global sourcing.

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Transport Network Vulnerability Metrics

This paper presents a review of road network vulnerability, seeking to synthesize different terminologies and metrics, among which: reliability, vulnerability, resilience, flexibility, robustness, and adaptive capacity.

Posted in my PUBLIC PRESENCE
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Reliability and vulnerability in road development projects

Why is the reliability, or conversely, the vulnerability, of the transportation network not a matter of evaluation in traditional cost-benefit analyses? Few will question that the sender, the recipient, the freight hauler or society in general, experience additional costs when goods or persons cannot reach their destinations in time or space.

Posted in my PUBLIC PRESENCE
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ARTICLES and PAPERS
Risks and supply chains... stochastically speaking2
A word of warning: This is not your typical journal article on supply chain risk. Risks and supply c[...]
Risk in supply networks - a tale of principals and agents
Sometimes the most interesting articles are found outside the mainstream journals of ones field, and[...]
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 [...]
Risk Management Simplified
Risk management. Why make it difficult when you can make it easy? That is perhaps what Andy Osborne [...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
The supply chain of the future
Many global supply chains are not equipped to cope with the world we are entering. Most were enginee[...]
When disaster strikes...
...how does the transportation network recover? And why are transportation networks so essential to [...]
from HERE and THERE
Supply chains and barcodes
Have you ever thought about how barcodes are a major factor in performance of supply chains? As we a[...]
Somali pirates forcing ships to make detour
In an earlier article today I quoted several sources saying that shipping companies are now seriousl[...]