Supply Chain Risk. Business Continuity. Transport Vulnerability. Resilience. Articles and papers. Books and book chapters. Reports and whitepapers. And more.
This simplified resilience assessment for road projects was presented at the XVIth World Winter Service and Road Resilience Congress in Calgary in February 2022. We call this method the 3R-method because we use three Rs, robustness, redundancy and recovery as a measure of resilience.
A resilience tool for roads
Norway has been using risk and vulnerability analysis for community planning for some 30 years now, ever since the term societal safety and security was coined in the mid-90s. The Norwegian Planning and Building code requires that all development projects, including roads, undergo a risk and vulnerability assessment in order to investigate the impact a project might have on societal safety and security.
While risk and vulnerability assessments are used in road planning in Norway on a regular basis, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration or NPRA for short needed a tool that was specifically tailored towards roads, and the particulars of the Norwegian road network. Consequently, a simplified resilience assessment was developed for assessing road projects in Norway. The method is called the 3R-method because we use three criteria, robustness, redundancy and recovery as a measure of resilience. The three critera can be visualized very similar to some of my previous research that I have described in earlier posts.
Robustness, resilience and recovery
A sparse transportation network
Norway’s transportation network is in large part a sparse network, with few links and few modes. I like to say that much of mainland Europe has what I call a free network, whereas Norway has what I call a constrained network. Much of the country is served by road only, and more often than not only one road. If disrupted, there are few if any alternatives.
Types of transport networks, based on the availability of modes
Thus, for societal safety and security, roads become crucial. This is why the NPRA developed this method. It is a qualitative assessment, done by an expert group.
3R explained
The idea behind 3R is to first determine the importance of the road project, be it local, regional or national, and then score the level of impact of the project on robustness, redundancy and recovery on a scale ranging from very negative to very positive. These individual scores are added up to total score, thus allowing for comparison of project alternatives, which could be minor differences within the same project proposal, or totally different project proposals.
Conducting 3R is done in four steps
Now, the score itself is not the final answer. What is more important, since this is a qualitative assessment, are the verbal arguments describing the impact, because they provide the actual decision support. That narrative is what matters most.
Level of importance
When it comes to importance, this is what separates local from regional from national. The issue here is to determine which critical services and businesses that are affected by the road project and how far the impact reaches. In our assessment criteria we decided that a project should support the military and in particular military supply routes in order to be nationally important.
Level of impact
In order to determine the level of impact and finding the right score, below are some of the key questions that we use. Robustness relates to the physical state of the road and the ability to withstand stress, be it natural hazards or traffic load. Redundancy relates to the existence of alternatives, and not merely the existence but also their suitability. Recovery relates to how quickly a disruption can be repaired in the short term and reconstructed in the long run.
Looking at Robustness one question may be what standard we are building, for example two-lane highway versus a four or six lane motorway. Looking at Redundancy one question might be to what degree we are introducing new links in the network, are we just bypassing a troublesome location or are there impacts beyond the project area. Looking at Recovery one question is whether a previously narrow and winding road is now replaced by a complex system of bridges and tunnels with a traffic control system added. That is not easily replaced.
Conclusion
Having used 3R for a couple of years now, we have found that the method is a highly flexible and multi-purpose tool. It can be used for new projects, existing infrastructure and value engineering.
3R adds value to the more traditional risk and vulnerability analysis. Specifically, it shows how robustness, redundancy and recovery interact in forming resilience.
3R is a holistic tool that highlights how all choices made early in the project can affect the performance of the road and how the road project contributes to societal safety and security or resilience, positively or negatively, depending on the actual design choices.
Presentation slides
Reference
Husdal, J., Petkovic, G. (2022) A simplified resilience approach for assessing road projects in Norway. Paper presented at the XVI WORLD WINTER SERVICE AND ROAD RESILIENCE CONGRESS, Calgary, Canada, February 7-11, 2022.
Resilience Adviser or Scaremonger? What am I really? That is what started to ask myself after I came across an article written by Frank Furedi the other day. In the article, Furedi, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, highlights the issue of vulnerability-driven policies and how possibilistic (worst likely) risk thinking has dethroned probabilistic (most likely) risk thinking. Why is it that we fear so much?
And the overemphasis on possible risks rather than probable risks is exactly what Furedi tackles head-on in this article Precautionary Culture and the Rise of Possibilistic Risk Assessment. Written in 2009, it is probably or possibly (pun intended) even more valid today than it was back then.
The shift from probabilistic to possibilistic risk management characterises contemporary cultural attitudes towards uncertainty. This shift in attitude is paralleled by the growing influence of the belief that future risks are not only unknown but are also unknowable.
Future risks – to many people – are not only uncertain, but also unknowable. So, while probable, but uncertain risks is something we can learn to live with, possible and unknown risks – and even worse: unknowable risks – are almost too much to bear.
The shift towards possibilistic thinking is driven by a powerful sense of cultural pessimism about knowing and an intense feeling of apprehension about the unknown. The cumulative outcome of this sensibility is the routinisation of the expectation of worst possible outcomes. The principal question posed by possibilistic thinking, ‘what can possibly go wrong’, continually invites the answer ‘everything’. The connection between possibilistic and worse-case thinking is self-consciously promoted by the advocates of this approach.
One of the defining features of our times is that anxiety about the unknown appears to have a greater significance than the fear of known threats. This constant feeling of anxiety is typical of today’s risk society, a society I wrote about risk society in a post 5 years ago: According to sociologist Anthony Giddens a risk society is increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), thus generating the notion of ubiquitous risk in whatever direction we look. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck defines it as a society that while hailing technology and innovation at the same time seeks to deal with the hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by technology and innovation itself. In other words, we’re more concerned with whatever possible bad that comes with the good than trying to assess how bad the bad really is, if at all.
Time and again the public is informed that the most dreadful dangers are not just ones that we cannot predict or anticipate but ones about which we cannot say anything because they are literally unknown. […] The traditional association of risk with probabilities is now contested by a growing body of opinion that believes that humanity lacks the knowledge to calculate them.
So instead of applying all our science and all our knowledge to close in on the most probable risks, the much easier solution is to home in on all possible risks, or better, on the most feared risks. It’s a vicious circle, because the less we know about a risk, the more we fear it, and the more we fear it, the more we want to deal with it, without investigating it, because it could happen any time, probable or not.
The future of the world appears to be a far darker and frightening one when perceived through the prism of possibilities rather than probabilities. Probabilities can be calculated and managed, and adverse outcomes can be minimised. In contrast, worse-case thinking sensitises the imagination to just that – worst cases.
Worse-case thinking, so Furedi, encourages society to adopt fear as of one of the dominant principles around which the public, its government, and institutions should organise their life. Insecurity is institutionalised and worst-case scenarios are thought of as so normal that people feel defenceless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats.
Furedi describes this overemphasis on possible threats instead of probable threats as “the devaluation of knowledge and the enthronement of ignorance”. We are ignorant because we prefer not to know about (the probability of) the risks, they are simply there, that is enough for us. Worst case risks are what drives our policies, not the actual risk.
And I?
Furedi does have point. In my attempts to convince my own management that we need to have crisis management plans and conduct emergency drills I must admit that I often resort to worst case scenarios. That said, the realisation is dawning on me that crisis management plans and drills need to be based on (f)actual and probable threats, not on fear alone.
Reference
Furedi, F. (2009) Precautionary Culture and the Rise of Possibilistic Risk Assessment. Erasmus Law Review 2(2), 197-220. DOI: 10.553/ELR221026712009002002005
Is my idea of how to differ robustness from flexibility from agility from resilience – hallmark of my research ideas – in any way related to the ideas of Nassim Taleb, Crawford Stanley Holling and Gary Hamel? Well, Sinan Si Alhir certainly thinks so, on a blog post that he wrote back in 2013, when he explored Taleb’s concept of Fragility and Antifragility. Interesting…, so where do I fit in?
Surprise surprise
Having had an online published presence for almost 20 years now it should not come as a surprise to me that every now and then I stumble across myself in the unlikeliest of places for the unlikeliest of reasons. That said, by now, based from the bits and pieces I have seen here and there, I really should no longer be so surprised that my idea of how to differ robustness from flexibility from agility from resilience resonates with quite a number of people, including Si Alhir, in his blog post on Antifragile, Flexibility, Robust, Resilience, Agility, and Fragile.
The champion of Creative Destruction
Nassim Taleb is certainly no stranger on this blog. After all, in 2009 I did review The Six Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management, an article he co-authored in the Harvard Business Review, and that was based on his book on Black Swans from 2007. And although I read the book, I never reviewed it, but I remember that liked his ideas. His latest book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder” makes creative destruction a major point.
The father of Resilience Theory
CS Holling does not have a blog post here; in hindsight I guess he should have, because he is often recognized as one of the if not THE founding father of resilience theory, and resilience has been one of the more frequent topics on husdal.com, even more so after I turned resilience practitioner after being a resilience researcher. That said, since Holling’s main domain lies within ecology I never thought of his resilience as something that I would be particularly interested in. That is why he is only mentioned as a side note in a blog post on transportation resilience.
The Iconoclast
Gary Hamel is another almost unknown on this blog. He shouldn’t be, because bGary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. In my small world he is mentioned in a comment on my blog post about the HBR guide to Managing External Risk, and I also mentioned him in my review of Lisa Välikangas book on The Resilient Organization, as her co-author in the article on The Quest for Resilience.
The Fantastic Four
So, in his blog post on Antifragile, Flexibility, Robust, Resilience, Agility, and Fragile Si Alhir features me and my definitions alongside those of Taleb, Hamel and Holling, and I must say that I do feel somewhat like being part of the Fantastic Four (pun intended):
However, the most interesting part of Si Alhirs blog post is not the side by side comparison, but a figure that integrates these concepts into one, and that shows how Taleb’s Fragility and Antifragility is a continuum that encloses or surrounds the other concepts.
I like this figure. In a previous blog post I explored Terje Aven’s definitions of vulnerability and resilience, and the notion that you can be generally resilient, but not generally vulnerable, only specifically vulnerable to the specific impact of a specific event relating to a specific risk. That notion now makes much more sense to me when I see fragility below vulnerability. This makes it clear that fragile is a general trait, while vulnerable is a specific trait.
A new way forward?
Taleb’s idea of antifragility is very intruiging, especially if seen the way that Si Alhir manages to put it into one figure that makes it all easy to understand and apply. That reminds me of a paper I wrote 10 years ago, in the early stages of what unfortunately did not manifest into a PhD. Anyway, in that paper – being a qualitative not a qualitative researcher – I took a liking of Giordano Bruno, the 16th century Italian philosopher. Bruno advocated the use of conceptualising, that is to think in terms of images, and he said that to think was to speculate with images. For people to understand science, according to Bruno, it ought to be rich in images and concepts, but poor in formulas.
I think that is exactly what Taleb is trying to do, and I look forward to reading his book on Antifragility, and to see how his ideas fit my own ideas. Si Alhir seems to think they do. I consider that a compliment.
Capability is an important measure in addressing vulnerabilities and in assessing resilience. Is there a way to quantitatively describe what capability entails? That is what Hanna Lindom, Henrik Tehler, Kerstin Eriksson and Terje Aven try to do, in a paper called The capability concept – On how to define and describe capability in relation to risk, vulnerability and resilience. And as the name implies, it’s not just about capability.
Background checks are worth doing
I came across this paper while doing some “background checks” – as I like to call it – on the paper I reviewed the other day. By background check I mean reading the references and/or other papers that could shed some same or different light on the issues in the paper in review. And because in that paper capability was highlighted as an important issue in supply chain risk management I began investigating the concept of capability and found this paper here. A very interesting paper, and definitely an Aven-ish paper, even though he only appears as the fourth author.
Definitions of capability
The concept of capability is used frequently in scientific literature. However, despite the fact that researchers
and practitioners frequently use the concept of capability, they rarely seem to define it. So say the authors. Nonetheless, in their extensive literature review they manage to find no less than 13 different definitions or descriptions of capability:
Looking more closely at these definitions, the authors put forward five trends: that capability equates to resources, that resources are an important part of capability, that capability is related to ability, that capability is related to capacity, and that capability is something that affects a goal.
Capability explained
Building on Aven’s definitions of risk, vulnerability and resilience the authors describe capability in a very same manner, and this is where the paper really is the most Aven-ish:
Capability is the uncertainty about and severity of the consequences of the activity given the occurrence of an initiating event and the performed task.
Capability = (CT U | A T)
This is definitely not an easy definition to follow if you haven’t read Aven’s other definitions first, so let me recapitulate those.
Risk is the uncertainty about and severity of the consequences of an activity.
This relates risk to the familiar definition of risk as a combination of probability and impact, where probability is not seen seen as a deterministic value but as a value that is uncertain and must be taken into account as such.
Vulnerability is the uncertainty about and severity of the consequences of the activity given the occurrence of an initiating event A.
This links vulnerability to risk, saying that a given vulnerability depends on a given risk, but only manifests itself when triggered by an event, meaning that one cannot be generally vulnerable, but only vis-a-vis a certain risk and only triggered by a certain event related to that certain risk.
Resilience is the uncertainty about and severity of the consequences of the activity given the occurence of any type of A.
This links resilience to vulnerability, saying that resilience constitutes the sum of vulnerabilities (or perhaps non-vulnerabilities) in relation to whatever trigger. While one cannot be generally vulnerable, one can be generally resilient.
Going back to the definition of capability can thus be interpreted as the uncertain effect a certain task has that is performed in relation to a vulnerability. There is no general capability, only a certain capability in relation to a certain vulnerability, depending on how a certain task addresses this vulnerability.
Capability explored
Going back to the paper, the authors develop an excellent case example of how capability can be understood the way they have defined it.
In the case example they take the reader through a set of various scenarios where they develop a stepwise determination of capability given the success or failure of the previous step, thus demonstrating that capability is inextricably linked to a task with an uncertain outcome (success or failure).
Conclusion
I started out by saying that this is a very Aven-ish paper, and it is. What is so Aven-ish are the abstract definitions that twist your mind and must be thought through and dissected word by word, and put back together again. I must admit that I in the beginning of my blogging career and academic endeavours stayed away from Aven’s papers because they were hard to grasp and intellectually challenging for a qualitative researcher like me. That said, maybe I have matured or maybe Aven has become more pragmatic over the years (albeit I doubt he has), because his papers have gotten easier to read and understand since I first started to read them. As to the topic of capability I now know a lot more about it.
Reference
Lindbom, H., Tehler, H. , Eriksson, K. , Aven, T. (2015) The capability concept – On how to define and describe capability in relation to risk, vulnerability and resilience. Reliability Engineering & System Safety (135), 45-54. DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2014.11.007
Antagonistic threats against supply chains are a special and limited array of risks and uncertainties that are demarcated by three key words: deliberate (caused), illegal (by law) and hostile (negative impact). In this paper, following up on Daniel Ekwall’s PhD thesis, Dafang Zhang, Payam Dadkhah and Daniel Ekwall suggest a suitable model of how to handle the risks and achieve security in a systematic and scientific way, where robustness and resilience play a major role.
Revisiting an old friend
I came across Daniel Ekwall some seven years ago when I found his PhD thesis that combined theories from criminology with theories from logistics and supply chain management to examine cross-over points or antagonistic gateways between legal and illegal logistics. In his thesis, Ekwall contended that there are basically two types of threats to logistics, theft/sabotage and smuggling. The theft/sabotage problem is directly aimed towards the logistics activities, while smuggling abuses the logistics system for illegal purposes. This paper takes this issue a small step further.
Finding myself
I guess I should have paid closer attention to Ekwall’s research and writings, because then I would have discovered this paper earlier and then I would have seen that which I now – if I may be a little presumptious here – can call my legacy within supply chain risk research, namely my illustration on the differences of robustness and resilience:
Back to the article in review, what the authors attempt to do – and succeed at, I must say – is to take current concepts and models of supply chain risk management, and adding supply chain security, not as a separate concept, but as a part of overall supply chain (risk) mangement. While most of the reviewed literature and quoted figures they highlight was quite familiar to, one figure taken from one book was new to me. This clear separation of suply chain risk and supply chain vulnerability and how they link up with risk management and decision-making is much in line with my own way of thinking:
On second thought, dwelling on why tis figure hasn’t caught my attention before, I suddenly realised that I had indeed reviewed the book it was taken from: Supply Chain Risk Management – Vulerability and Resilience in Logistics by Donald Waters. Admittedly, the reviw was done in 2008. Looking back at the review I did almost 8 years ago, I must have thought the book to be of too little academic value to me at that time.
Safety Net
Anyway, I’m sorry for digressing again, what the authors are investigating are what specific supply chain assets that are susceptible to antagonistic threats, and how supply chain security measures can apply robustness and resilience. They illustrate this with a focal model of Robustness and Resilience:
This model shows the relationship between strategies for robustness and strategies for resilience, as seen from a company perspective and from a security provider perspective.
In the company and transportation network perspective, every components of the supply chain should become robust and resilience. The robust strategy is to handle small risks ahead of the event, and manage regular fluctuations like some low impact with high likelihood accidents. Resilience strategy can help the companies adapt, improvise and overcome those disturbance and disruptions greater than the robust can handle. It helps the companies to survive after suffering from big risks and changes.
The right side of the model is further developed into what the authors call a “safety net” of services: site security, transportation security, emergency services, consultation services, and collaboration:
Site security is about protecting every node in the transferral of goods in the transportation network, e.g. warehouses, terminals, factories, and ports. Transportation security is about protecting the transportation as such, e.g. the vehicles en-roue and during parking, as well as the drivers. Emergency services provide a quick response in addition to security operations. Security providers can also act as professional consultants, and lastly, security providers are also likely to collaborate with other organisations to improve their own (and the others’) service level and the overall capability to thwart any security threats.
Conclusion and critique
Akward English sentences and lack of flow aside (see citation above), this article does have some good points. Supply chain security appears to be overlooked in supply chain risk management. However, supply chain security can add to the robustness and resileince of the overall supply chain, providing a “safety net” of services that protects, secures and enhances the overall supply chain operation.
The company versus security provider model brings together both sides of the perspective in a way that does create a consistent groundwork for building robustness and resilience. The safety net model extends beyond the supply chain and identifies the assets that need to be protected and how they can be protected.
However, after finishing reading my first thought was that there should have been a conclusion after the authors’ chosen conclusion, because the article seems to stop abruptly, leaving loose ends that could have been wrapped up a bit more, at least from an academic perspective.
That said, for a logistics and transportation manager this paper is well worth reading.
Reference
Zhang, D., Dadkhah, P. Ekwall, D. (2011) How robustness and resilience support security business against antagonistic threats in transport network. Journal of Transportation Security 3 (4) 201-219 DOI: 10.1007/s12198-011-0067-2
Is what I am doing worthwhile? Is anybody reading and using what I write? Am I contributing to a broader and/or better understanding of supply chain risk and (transport) vulnerability? After more than a decade of blogging and researching I think those are legitimate questions to ask. More than anything, am I making an impact…at all? For many of us researchers that is an important question, because, after all, we do hope that someone picks up our ideas.
Robustness and Flexibility 2004
One concept that I have found cited more recently is what started out 11 years ago in 2004 as a university course paper on flexibility and robustness as options to reduce risk and uncertainty. In hindsight, it is not a paper I am particularly proud of, but it was the starting point for an illustration that later became the core idea of much of my work.
Flexibility and Robustness
Admittedly, not the best illustration, but the idea was to show that robustness means enduring and withstanding changes in the environment without severe impact, while flexibility means reacting to and adapting to the same changes, while not deviating from the target.
The idea here was to show that robust means staying on course, despite being buffeted from both/many/all sides. Yes, there are impacts, but they do not severely hamper reaching the target. In this picture flexible means reacting to environmental circumstances and changing course or even the target without reducing performance. Resilient is coming back to where we were after suffering a blow or setback.
Here I differentiated between flexibility and agility by saying that flexibility meant reacting to environmental changes in an expected and preplanned manner, while agility implied reacting in an unexpected and unplanned (creative) manner.
Robustness, Flexibility, Agility and Resilience 2010
While I not stated it explicitly, the definitions read like this
Robustness is the ability to endure foreseen and unforeseen changes in the environment without adapting.
Flexibility is the ability to react to foreseen and unforeseen changes in the environment in a pre-planned manner.
Agility is the ability to react to unforeseen changes in the environment in an unforeseen and unplanned manner.
Resilience is the ability the ability to survive foreseen and unforeseen changes in the environment that have a severe and enduring impact.
All four are linked, all four are important in risk management, but they all put different weight on what should be the focal point.
Dissemination
No longer a part of academia, I have little means of disseminating my ideas, but I am glad to see that my rather lengthy discourse on the difference between this terms in the book chapter has struck a cord with a number of recent publications on supply chain risk and resilience:
The resilience of infrastructure systems can be measured by two dimensions: robustness, the extent of system function that is maintained, and rapidity, the time required to return to full system operations and productivity. That is the theme in Fostering resilience to extreme events within infrastructure systems: Characterizing decision contexts for mitigation and adaptation, written by Tim McDaniels, Stephanie Chang, Joseph Mikawoz, Darren Cole, and Holly Longstaff. A very interesting paper, indeed, for more than one reason.
What influences the disruption profile?
In a previous post on transport network resilience by Mattson and Jenelius, I was struck by a figure they had taken from this paper. It was a disruption profile, used time and again by a number of researchers within resilience, vulnerability, reliability and related subjects.
In this particular paper the shape of the disruption profile is influenced by two variables: robustness and rapidity. Robustness, in turn, is influenced by mitigation, while adaptation influences rapidity. As a concept this makes sense.
More interesting than the above figure is the construct behind it, illustrated in the form of a flowchart, showing how the influence of mitigation and adaptation comes into play:
At the top of the figure is the socio-technical context. Here are the variables that affect the decisions as to how much pre-disaster mitigation that is required (e.g. by law or based on prior experience), how much that is desired (e.g. risk acceptance) or how much that is economically viable (budgetary constraints).
Following the mitigation decision, at the next level, the system’s vulnerability is determined by another set of variables: the system’s technical resilience, and the organization’s organisational resilience and how they meet the next variable, which is a particular hazard.
Combined, technical and organisational resilience determine the immediate operational capacity following an event, depending on the hazard causing the event. That is the system’s robustness.
After the immediate operational capacity has been established, adaptation decisions must be made as to how to regain full operational recovery, the speed of which is a system’s rapidity in getting back to normal.
The evaluation of pre-disaster and post-disaster decisions and actions initiates a learning process that in turn leads to a new socio-technical context.
In essence, pre-disaster mitigation fosters robustness, and post-disaster adaptation fosters rapidity.
Conclusion
This paper clearly outlines a conceptual framework where resilience, a combination of both rapidity and robustness, is a result of ex-ante and ex-post decisions. Albeit resilience in common thinking more often than not is linked to how an organisation copes with an event ex-post, much of the groundwork for the coping process is laid ex-ante.
Reference
McDaniels, T., Chang, S., Cole, D., Mikawoz, J., Longstaff, H. (2008) Fostering resilience to extreme events within infrastructure systems: Characterizing decision contexts for mitigation and adaptation. Global Environmental Change 2 (18), 310–318
Maritime transport is a vital backbone of today’s global and complex supply chains. Unfortunately, the specific vulnerability of maritime supply chains has not been widely researched. This paper by Øyvind Berle, Bjørn Egil Asbjørnslett and James B Rice puts it right and presents a Formal Vulnerability Assessment of a maritime transportation system. This is not the first maritime paper that Asbjørnslett has contributed to on this blog, and he keeps up the good work he started in 2007, when he presented Coping with risk in maritime logistics at ESREL 2007.
Maritime transport – a forgotten part of supply chains?
I guess it is true that maritime transport or sea transport is an overlooked part of supply chains, even on this blog. In my more than 500 posts the word “maritime only occurs in 20 of them. Well, perhaps not so forgotten, but maybe such an obvious part of today’s supply chains that it is not looked at specifically, and just assumed to be part of the wider picture. Considering Norway’s maritime and seafaring tradition, it is not surprising to see Norwegian researchers taking up this particular question. One of the authors, Asbjørnslett, is part of the Marine System Design research group at the Department of Marine Technology at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, where he among other topics is involved in research related to risk taxonomies in maritime transport systems, risk assessment in fleet scheduling, and studies of vessel accident data for improved maritime risk assessment.
The invisble risk?
It is interesting to see what starting point the authors use in their introduction, namely the 2008 Global Risk Report by the World Economic Forum. In my post on Supply Chain Vulnerability – the invisible global risk I highlighted that report, which listed the hyper-optimization of supply chains as one of four emerging threats at that time, and as the authors put it:
[…] risks in long and complex supply chains are obscured by the sheer degree of coupling and interaction between sources, stakeholders and processes within and outside of the system; disruptions are inevitable, management and preparation are therefore difficult […]
Akin to the infamous “Butterfly effect”, even a minor local disruption in my supply chain could have major and global implications not just on the company directly linked to the supply chain, i.e. me, but also on other businesses. Or conversely, some other company’s disruption may affect me severely, even though I in no (business) way am connected to said company.
Issues and questions
With that in mind the authors set out to address these particular issues they found in their preliminary observations:
I1—respondents have an operational focus; in this, they spend their efforts on frequent minor disruptions rather than the larger accidental events.
I2—stakeholders do know that larger events do happen, and they know that these are very costly, yet they do not prepare systematically to restore the system.
I3—maritime transportation stakeholders find their systems unique. As a consequence, they consider that little may be learnt from benchmarking other maritime transportation system’s efforts in improving vulnerability reduction efforts.
I4—there seems to be little visibility throughout the maritime transportation system.
which led them to to propose these research questions:
RQ1—what would be a suitable framework for addressing maritime transportation system vulnerability to disruption risks?
RQ2—which tools and methods are needed for increasing the ability of operators and dependents of maritime transportation to understand disruption risks, to withstand such risk, and to prepare to restore the functionality of the transportation system after a disruption has occurred?
I like this introduction, clearly identifying a direction and purpose of the paper.
FSA – Formal Safety Assessmement
In order to solve the research questions the authors transfer the safety-oriented Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) framework into the domain of maritime supply chain vulnerability, and call it Formal Vulnerability Assessment (FVA) methodology. FSA – for those of you who don’t know, including me – is a structured and systematic methodology, aimed at enhancing maritime safety, including protection of life, health, the marine environment and property, by using risk analysis and cost benefit assessment:
What might go wrong?
= identification of hazards (a list of all relevant accident scenarios with potential causes and outcomes) How bad and how likely?
= assessment of risks (evaluation of risk factors); Can matters be improved?
= risk control options (devising regulatory measures to control and reduce the identified risks) What would it cost and how much better would it be?
= cost benefit assessment (determining cost effectiveness of each risk control option); What actions should be taken?
= recommendations for decision-making (information about the hazards, their associated risks and the cost effectiveness of alternative risk control options is provided).
While not fully the same, this assessment follows in essence the ISO 31000 risk management steps of risk identification, risk analysis, risk evaluation and risk treatment, a framework that I am very familiar with.
Deconstructing the maritime transport network
What I like in particular is how they deconstructed the maritime transport network, divided the land from the sea and looked at how a vessel interacts with a port that in turn interacts with other modes of transport:
It’s a figure that reminds of my last project I took part in during the autumn of 2011 while still in academia, where we investigated Customer and Agent Initiated Intermodal Transport Chains, and looked at barriers and incentives to competition and collaboration in intermodal transport. I’m not sure the figure would have helped if I had known about it, but it would have made a few things a bit clearer. Kudos to Berle et al. for coming up with it.
Kaplan and Garrick
It is rare to find papers like this that use Kaplan and Garrick’s definition of risk:
Risk may be defined as a triplet of scenario, frequency and consequence of events that may contribute negatively (in this case to the transportation system’s ability to perform its mission. A hazard is a source of potential damage; Kaplan and Garrick describe risk as hazards divided by safeguards. In this, risks cannot be completely removed, only reduced.
I do like this definition of risk, because risk can be seen as incompletely described unless all three elements are in place. An untrained individual or business entity often stops short after the first, or maybe the second question, without fully considering the third. In risk management, addressing the impacts is an important issue, which is why the consequences need to be considered along with the likelihood and source of risk. In this paper, developing a method for assessing the vulnerability i.e. consequences, and deconstructing the maritime transport network, i.e. scenario, this definition of risk makes a lot more sense than any other definition of risk.
Failure modes
Another interesting idea in the paper is the concept of failure modes, taken from the book System Reliability Theory: Models, Statistical Methods, and Applications, written by two Norwegian professors (from NTNU, again, no surprise). Failure modes are used to investigate and understand how the maritime transport system is able to handle unexpected hazards and threats and low-frequency high impact scenarios:
Failure modes are defined as the key functions and capabilities of the supply chain, loss of any such would reduce or remove the ability of the system to perform its mission.
The concept of “mission” is important here, because it emphasizes what vulnerability in a systems perspective is, namely the inability to function and deliver (whatever the system is supposed to deliver):
The critical ways a transportation system may fail can be summed up as the loss of capacity to supply, financial flows, transportation, communication, internal operations/capacity and human resources, which may be described as follows: supply capacity is the ability necessary to source provisions needed for the element to perform its function; for a factory, this is inbound materials, utilities and electricity. Financial flows cover the ability to access capital and liquidity/cash flow. Transportation is the ability to move materials, including those presently at work. Communication would include enabling technology, and is vital for transparency in the supply chain. Internal operations entail the organization’s processing capacity (e.g. converting materials into a good). Quality issues reducing outputs fall into internal operations. Loss of human resources singles out the human factor explicitly from internal operations—what are the personnel needs for the supply chain functions?
The concept of failure modes is an idea the authors developed in a previous paper, Failure modes in ports – a functional approach to throughput vulnerability, a paper which I will review as soon as I get a copy of it. I think the failure modes concept captures the idea of what could go wrong in the maritime supply chain, as seen from a systems perspective:
Hazards and Mission
This is where it gets interesting. In order to transfers the FSA into a FVA, the FVA hazard focus is shifted towards the FVA mission focus. For example, the question of what can go wrong is turned into the question of which functions/capabilities should be protected (to ensure the functionality of the maritime transport system). The same is done for the other questions. Where the FSA looks at measures to mitigate most important risks the FVA looks at measures to restore functions/capabilities. This kind of parallel or similar thinking shows how easy it may be to transfer a concept from one domain into another domain.
Case example – LNG
The FVA is put to test in practice, using LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) shipping as their case. At first I thought there must be better examples, but the issue is that
[…] this analysis is relevant to study energy import dependencies, as current LNG supply chains are optimized to the level that much of the system storage and flexibility can be found in the shipping element, lacking on-shore infrastructure […]
and therefore, definitely a case worth studying.
Conclusion
Not only do the authors develop a conceptual framework for assessing the vulnerability of maritime transport networks, the successfully transfer the maritime Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) framework into the domain of maritime supply chain vulnerability and demonstrate that the approach works. It is not done according to IMO’s own standard, the FSA, thus extending vessel safety to port safety and supply chain safety. I think that this will help this approach gaining acceptance within the wider maritime community. The paper is well-written and well-structured, but I could have wished for a bit more about the FSA. Never having heard about it I had to do some research to find what this was all about. All in all, the paper is a showcase example of how easy it can be to transfer concepts from one domain to another domain, exemplifying a cross-fertilization of research strands.
Reference
Berle, Ø., Asbjørnslett, B.E. and Rice, J.B. (2011) Formal Vulnerability Assessment of a maritime transportation system. Reliability Engineering and System Safety (96) 6, 696–705 DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2010.12.011
Organisational Resilience Literature. “What to read, and what not to read”. That could be the popular title of this paper. Written by Alessandro Annarelli and Fabio Nonini their paper on Strategic and operational management of organizational resilience: Current state of research and future directions classifies and sorts more than 70 articles along two axes: static versus dynamic resilience and single organisations versus supply networks or industries.. Essentially, this paper will help you decide which papers that fall into which of these four quadrants and which papers you should read depending on your research interests.
Comprehensive
According to the authors, they did “a systematic literature search and co-citation analysis to investigate the specific research domains of organizational resilience and its strategic and operational management to understand the current state of development and future research directions”. More than 400 papers out of thousands of documents were selected and narrowed down to 70 or so core papers, clearly showing the dominating trends within research into organisational resilience.
1.Theoretical foundations and applications, e.g. Christopher and Peck (2004)
2. Implementation, improvement and measurement of resilience, e.g. Sheffi and Rice (2005)
3. Models for resilience.
4. Other theoretical perspectives.
(The linked papers have been reviewed on this blog)
What to read, or not
In addition, the authors used multidimensional scaling(MDS) to produce a graphic that represents conceptual proximity, or similarity, between publications. This is what I found to be the most interesting part about this paper, because I now can find the most related or otherwise different literature, just by looking at the figure below and going to the reference list in the paper. That is very helpful, indeed.
Annarelli and Nonino (2015)
It’s quite interesting to see where some of the papers that have been reviewed on this blog fall and what papers that are closely related and that I have not yet discovered, which means that I have a lot of work to do in terms of possible reviews on this blog.
Future research
Finally the authors describe 7 areas of future research
Theory testing on design, implementation, and improvement processes to enhance organizational resilience.
Measurement of organizationalandoperationalresilience.
Resilience in Small Medium Enterprises.
Restoration models for the supply chain and operational processes.
Impact of introducing information systems on organizational resilience.
Anticipatory innovation to enhance processes’ resilience.
Strategic approach and dynamic capabilities for becoming a resilient organization.
and why these are the important issues that warrant further investigation.
Conclusion
This paper’s reference list contains more than 200 items. Combined with the sorting and review done in the paper this is very valuable resource for any researcher of organisational resilience.
Reference
Annarelli, A., & Nonino, F. (2015). Strategic and operational management of organizational resilience: Current state of research and future directions Omega DOI: 10.1016/j.omega.2015.08.004
Ever since I started to work for the Southern Region office of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (Statens vegvesen Region sør) three years ago I haven’t been able to come up with a good job title in English. There simply isn’t any immediate equivalent in English to the Norwegian title that springs to mind, or that exists in a similar fashion in the English-speaking world. It was only after reading Erik Hollnagel’s definition of resilience that I finally realised that I am an Resilience Adviser.
Safety or security ?
Even in Norwegian it’s hard to explain to friends and family, and colleagues for that matter, what I actually do for a living. I am an adviser in “samfunnssikkerhet” as it is called in Norwegian. Finding the English equivalent hasn’t been easy, as I said, until I started studying the concept of resilience. So why does samfunnssikkerhet equal resilience?
Well, samfunn in Norwegian means society, sikkerhet can mean either safety or security in Norwegian since we do not have separate words for it. So samfunnssikkerhet can be societal security or societal safety, or both.
Samfunnssikerhet and Societal security
Societal securityis a concept developed by the Copenhagen School of security studies in the 1990s (Wikipedia). It refers to
the ability of a society to persist in its essential character under changing conditions and possible or actual threats
The standard definition for samfunnssikkerhet in Norway, set by a government commission in 2000 is
the ability of a society to maintain critical (essential) functions and the life, health and essential needs of its population under various forms of stress
The wording is perhaps not exactly the same, but both definitions emphasize “essential”, and in my view social security as the English translation captures what samfunnssikkerhet is all about.
Societal security as the English translation of the Norwegian samfunnssikkerhet has been used in particular by Jan Hovden from SINTEF,the research intstitute of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU. He even wrote an English paper on the subject in 2004 titled Public policy and administration in a vulnerable society: regulatory reforms initiated by a Norwegian commission. I found and reviewed it on my blog 5 years ago: Risk society.
Societal security and safety – Resilience
What I found most brilliant about the paper was how he managed to merge the concept of societal safety and security. So safety is included in societal security, but is societal security then really the right word? I think perhaps.
Samfunnssikkerhet and Societal safety
Societal safety as the translation of samfunnssikkerhet is mostly used by SEROS, the Centre for Risk Management and Societal Safety, a research centre with the University of Stavanger, UiS. They describe social safety as cross-disciplinary theory and methods for social planning, emergency preparedness, crisis management, safety management, risk perception and risk communication.
UiS offers BSc, MSc and PhD in samfunnssikkerhet or what they in English call Risk Management and Societal Safety, and societal safety is then the term that is most likely to be widely used for samfunnssikkerhet in the future. Is that the right word? I don’t think so.
Samfunnssikkerhet and Resilience
While societal security or societal safety are no too bad translations of samfunnssikkerhet that do make sense in English, I’m not so sure they capture the essence of samfunnssikkerhet.That is why I am strongly in favor of resilience. As Hollnagel puts it, resilience is
the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions
If you think of society as a system and if you replace required with essential in this definition, or if you replace the words vice versa you pretty much have the same definition.
Meet the Resilience Adviser
In my view resilience would be a much better English word for the Norwegian samfunnssikkerhet, just look at Resilient Organisations in New Zealand. They have taken research on resilience in organisations (and society) to a whole new level and put it into practice, and I hope to spread and disseminate what they do in my own work, and thus contribute to spreading resilience thinking in Norway.
So I now call myself “Resilience Adviser”. And what do I do? My job is to oversee that the state-managed road network in my region is planned, built, operated and maintained so that it can function 24/7/365, and thus ensure societal safety and societal security, i.e. resilience.
The only problem now is that there is no good Norwegian word for the English word resilience…sigh…
Resilience. It is not so much about reducing the number of things that go wrong, but it is about improving the number of things that go right. So says Erik Hollnagel in the opening prologue of Resilience Engineering in Practice, a book he co-edited with several others. To me this means that resilience thinking turns risk management thinking on its head, and resilience engineering, so Hollnagel, rests on responding, monitoring, anticipating and learning. In that order. But why are these four elements so crucial to resilience?
Risk matrix and risk management redefined
What Hollnagel means is that the ability to respond to events, the ability to monitor ongoing developments, the ability to anticipate future threats – and importantly, future opportunities, and that the ability to learn from past failures and successes is what makes a business resilient, or an organisation, or society for that matter.
Personally, I have always seen the learning part as important to resilience, much like Liisa Välikanga wrote in her book on The Resilient Organization. But where Välinkanga focusses on an organisation that is innovative, robust, adaptable and strong, an organization that is engaged, competitive and strives for success, Hollnagel focusses on an organisation that is, well, uhm…resilient? Just that, simple and beautiful.
Hollnagel’s range of outcomes
Hollnagel relinquishes the good old risk matrix, because he thinks it is too concerned with the negative and too concerned with what we fear. The risk matrix perspective tends to overstate the importance of preparing for worst-case scenario, instead of looking at how the world really is. Normally, things go right, very right, even if they start out wrong. Therefore, he describes a new model, that includes the positive side as well, and that takes into account the full range of outcomes to any situation.
Four possible outcomes
Hollnagel divides the outcomes into four possibilities:
Positive outcomes that have a high probability – things that not only go right, but that are also intended to go right.
Positive outcomes that have a low probability – things that happen, not because they were meant to happen, but they just happened, sometimes out of sheer luck.
Negative outcomes with a low probability – things that go wrong, often unexpected, but less often unimaginable, and more often than not with dire consequences.
Negative outcomes with a high probability – things that go wrong, which must realistically (or statistically) be expected to happen, however, usually without serious consequences.
In my opinion, this way of looking at the world not only makes us spend less efforts on preventing low-probability-high-consequence events, or Black Swans as Nassim Taleb calls them. Instead it enables us to spend more efforts on making things go right and looking at why and how things go right.
This point of view is essential to resilience engineering. According to Hollnagel, in Resilience Engineering sees”things that go wrong” as the flip side of “things that go right”, assuming that hey are the result of the same underlying process.
It therefore makes as much senses to try to understand why things go right as to understand why they go wrong. In fact it makes much more sense because there are many more things that go right than wrong. Resilience Engineering argues that it is necessary to look at success as well as at failures precisely in order to understand why things go wrong. There are no fundamental differences between performance that leads to failure and performance that leads to success.
Hollnagel defines resilience as
the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions
and argues that this definition emphasises the ability of the system to function under both expected and unexpected conditions, not just to avoid failure or withstand adversity. Hence, it is wiser for an organisation to do more things right than to do less things wrong. Learning from success, not learning from failure, is the key to sustaining any business.
Knowing what to do, that is, how to respond to regular and irregular disruptions and disturbances, either by a prepared set of measures or by adjusting normal functioning. This is the ability to address the actual.
Knowing what to look for, that is, how to monitor that which is or can become a threat or in the near term, both in the environment and in the system itself. That is the ability to address the critical.
Knowing what to expect, that is, how to anticipate developments, threats and opportunities further into the future, such as potential changes, disruptions, pressures and their consequences. That is the ability to address the potential.
Knowing what has happened, that is, how to learn from experience, in particular how to learn the right lessons from the right experiences – successes as well as failures. That is the ability to learn.
This figure illustrates how the cornerstones work together:
Hollnagel’s four cornerstones of resilience
Critique
Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on this, but Hollnagel states that resilience engineering must look at both sides of the coin, things that go right and things that go wrong. I can see that in the first cornerstone, what to do, and the fourth cornerstone, what has happened. In the second cornerstones it is missing. I for one would say that that what to look for should not only include near term threats, but also long-term opportunities. However, it does seem to appear in the third cornerstone, what to expect, where opportunities is mentioned.
Conclusion
This is a brilliant discussion of what resilience is all about. I must admit that I haven’t read all the other chapters in the book,yet this introduction stands out as a marvel in explaining in simple words what the core issue is. Nothing here that is “academically interesting, but practically totally irrelevant”, as I like to say about some research. This is not only academically sound, it is also practically sound, and I look forward to putting this into practice in my line of work.
Reference
Hollnagel, E. (2011) Prologue: the scope of resilience engineering. In: Hollnagel, E., Dédale, J.P., Woods, D., Wreathall, J. (Eds.) Resilience Engineering in Practice: A Guidebook. Ashgate, pp. xxix–xxxix.
I’ve been away from academia for the last three years, and in my efforts to catch up with the latest research in transport-related vulnerability and resilience I decided to start with the most recent papers, and track my way backwards using the references cited as a potential guideline. This paper by Lars-Göran Mattsson and Erik Jenelius on Vulnerability and resilience of transport systems – A discussion of recent research seemed like a good start. What first struck me with this paper not the extesive reference list, but a figure the authors used.
Not the first time
The reason why the figure struck me is that from time to time there are similar figures that appear in a number of different papers, and as a researcher I am always intrigued to find the original source and who came up with this figure in the first place. I first saw this figure it in 2007 when I reviewed Youssi Sheffi’s book The Resilient Enterprise. There they describe what they call a “disruption profile”, which looks something like this:
Sheffi 2004
Going back in time 20 years, a very similar figure was used in Rausand and Einarssons paper from 1997 on An Approach to Vulnerability Analysis of Complex Industrial Systems, showing how an accidental event produces a consequence scenario, a disruption that tests the systems survivability:
Einarsson and Rausand 1997
Similarly, Mattson and Jenelius use a figure they call “Effects of decision-making on resilience”, which relates to same subject, but has a different approach:
Mattsson and Jenelius 2015
Obviously all figures address the same issue, that is the effect of disruptive events on system function (Mattson an Jenelius) or supply chain performance (Sheffi). The difference is that while Sheffi integrates mitigation and adaption in the shape of his one curve, Mattson and Jenelius specifically show how much mitigation and adaption contribute to changing how the curve bends.
So, while the principle behind the figure may not be original, the way that Mattson and Jenelius put it to use in their paper is definitely ground-breaking, because it clearly shows how mitigation can lessen the impact of an event and how resilience can be an expression of how the organisation returns to normal after an event.
Mitigation and adaptation
Now, mitigation and adaptation are two very intriguing concepts here. Essentially, risk management is all about mitigation, whereas adaptation lays the groundwork for resilience. In my world, where risk management is very much based on the bow-tie principle, mitigation is primarily concerned with the left side of the bow-tie, reducing the likelihood of events occurring. I called it mitigative actions and contingent actions respectively.
Bow-tie
Mitigation, where I come from, is mostly concerned with prevention. However, as I am now gradually discovering, mitigation addresses the whole bow-tie, both the causes on the left side and the consequences on the right side. Resilience then, looks further to right of the bow-tie, and how the organisation tries to deal with the long-term impacts of an event. That is a new point of view that I hadn’t thought about, or rather, I had thought about it, but I haven’t able to put it into a figure as brilliantly as Mattsson and Jenelius have done in this paper. It appears to me now that the bow tie is only about preparedness, response, and recovery. By adding adaptation to those three we also add resilience.
First a vulnerability analysis, then resilience
The authors go on to discuss the current literature on resilience and settle for Hollnagel’s four cornerstone definition: knowing what to do, what to look for, what to expect, and what has happened. Vulnerability analysis is an important prerequisite for adequate proactive actions.
Mattsson and Jenelius (2015) Resilience
Resilience, so Hollnagel, can be defined as:
the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions
the degree of ability that an object has to withstand the effects of an (unwanted) event and to resume its original condition or function after that event.
Here the negativity of vulnerability (as in susceptibility to fail) is defined in a positive way, by saying that the better the ability to withstand, the lesser the vulnerability. So actually, my definition of vulnerability in a sense is not too far from Hollnagel’s definition of resilience. Another new discovery for me.
Conclusion
This is a very interesting paper that combines a qualitative introduction with a quantitative argumentation when it comes to exemplifying their discourse. The paper also contains a number of promising references related to resilience that I plan to discuss in a later post.
Reference
Mattsson, L-G., Jenelius, E (2015) Vulnerability and resilience of transport systems – A discussion of recent research. Transportation Research Part A 81 (2015) 16–34. DOI:10.1016/j.tra.2015.06.002
Striking gold in the blogosphere. Or was is just dust? This month’s blog is aptly titled “Gold or Dust” and is based on a true story, namely the academic journey of Charlie Newnham, who is studying for her MSc in Resilience at the University of Cranfield, UK. I wasn’t even aware that such a program existed and the blog chronicles her (almost daily) thoughts, her ideas and struggles as she comes to grip with what to write in her thesis topic, starting in December 2010, and now nearing completion. Is it dust? No, it’s pure gold. At least by my standards. Continue reading →
What does it mean to be a resilient organization? That is the topic of The Resilient Organization, written by Liisa Välikangas and subtitled How Adaptive Cultures Thrive Even when Strategy Fails. Here, resilience is more than just the ability to meet adversity; resilience as Välikangas sees it, is an essential element of a company’s competitive advantage, consisting of innovation, design or structure, adaptability and strength. Blending academic research and managerial insights this book provides a different look at resilience from a perspective that is quite different from the usual definition of resilience as a mostly operational attribute.
What happens when a business is disabled for a length of time? What are the impacts on its profitability, service delivery, and employees? What are the flow-on effects to the broader community? What are the key attributes that can help a business to bounce back or bounce forward from a disruption? Those are the issues the Australian Resilience Expert Advisory Group REAG discusses in a position paper titled Organisational Resilience. I was alerted to this paper by a recent post on the blog of Ken Simpson, a resilience expert and blogger from Australia. The paper details a set of core principles and resilience attributes that can be applied across a diverse range of critical infrastructure organisations, and although it is aimed at the individual business and its management, it is a paper that makes sense in a range of organizational settings.
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.
There hasn’t been a proper literature review on my blog for a while, but this post will put it right again, hopefully. Moreover, there hasn’t been a post on transportation for a while either, and this post will put that right, too. The other day I came across Transportation security and the role of resilience: A foundation for operational metrics, a recent article by Andrew Cox, Fynnwin Prager and Adam Rose that presents a framework for evaluating transportation resilience, including the important role of perceptions in potentially amplifying security risks. With transportation being a major part of any supply chain this article also presents a framework for evaluating supply chain security and resilience. Based on the July 2005 terrorist attacks in London this paper not only develops a predictive resilience measures but also describes various strategies at the macro, micro and meso level.
Operations Rules by David Simchi-Levi comes with an ambiguous title. You can read this two ways: 1) Operations Management (over)rules Supply Chain Management or 2) The Rules of (Business) Operations Management. Either way, this is an excellent book with a broad scope. Most importantly perhaps, it contains an extensive chapter on managing supply chain risk, something that is very rare in the average book on supply chain management. That should not come as a surprise, however, because this is not an average book. It is one of the most applicable and practically oriented books on supply chain operations that has come across my desk in recent times. Continue reading →
The risk perception an individual supply chain professional has influences the risk management strategies this individual chooses to mitigate the effect of potential supply chain disruptions. But does risk perception influence the occurrence of disruptions? In other words, if you think you are at risk, are you actually more likely to experience disruptions than if you think you are not at risk? Enhancing supply chain resilience with flexibility and redundancy is one way to counter supply chain disruptions. But do the chosen resilience measures actually play a moderating role in reducing the frequency of supply chain disruptions? That is what George Zsidisin and Stephan Wagner investigate in their newest article, Do Perceptions Become Reality? The Moderating Role of Supply Chain Resiliency on Disruption Occurrence. This article paints an interesting picture of how supply chain professionals view risk, which risk they perceive and what they do in reaction to these risks.
Have you heard of ISO 28002? No? You should take note of this standard, because the ISO 28000 series specifies the requirements for a security management system for the supply chain. The standards address potential security issues at all stages of the supply process, thus targeting threats such as terrorism, fraud and piracy. The most recent addition to the series is ISO 28002: Security management systems for the supply chain – Development of resilience in the supply chain, published in September 2010. ISO 28002 details how an organization can engage in a comprehensive and systematic process of prevention, protection, preparedness, mitigation, response, continuity and recovery. This post will take an inside look at ISO 28002 and highlight the essential content.
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