Tag Archives: resilience

In memoriam David Kaye

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Sad news. I don’t always keep up with the subjects of my reviews, and today I was very saddened to learn that David Kaye passed away more than a year ago. David Kaye was the author of Managing Risk and Resilience in the Supply Chain, a book I reviewed on this blog some 18 months ago. David Kaye was a leading author, lecturer, examiner and workshop leader on risk management and business continuity subjects. He guided a diverse range of companies and public sector organisations on risk related issues around the world. His book was a great inspiration to me when I read it and it will continue to be so in the future.

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Adaptation versus Transformation

Revised on: 2015-09-12

Many businesses believe themselves to be nested in a stable environment and are confounded when things suddenly change, and the world today no longer is the same world it was yesterday. Adapt or transform, that is the question, and in Adaptive Fit Versus Robust Transformation: How Organizations Respond to Environmental Change, written by Cynthia Lengnick-Hall and Tammy Beck in 2005, both options are explored. While adaptation may work temporarily, transformation and building a resiliency capacity is what works best in the long run. What is it about resilience that is so important, and most importantly, why?

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Organizing Resilience

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

Resilience. A word that his been in the media perhaps more than ever before these days. I am of course thinking about the rescue of the Chilean miners and how it was possible for them to survive and emerge almost unaffected (as many of them seemed to be) after being trapped underground for 69 days. How is it possible that they adjusted and almost thrived in their adversity? Resilience is the answer. Resilience is what distinguishes those who fail from those who succeed, say Kathleen Sutcliffe and Timothy Vogus in Organizing for Resilience, a book chapter they wrote in 2003. Here they provide insights into why resilience is not something remarkable or extraordinary, but rather a result of an organizational learning process.

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Cutting costs or cutting risks?

Revised on: 2011-03-17

One of the blogs I like to browse from time to time, particularly when looking for topics related to resilience and business, is the Enterprise Resilience Management Blog. Written by Stephen F. DeAngelis, a technologist who creates businesses at the intersection of technology and major business and global trends, I like it because he takes bits and pieces from a variety of online, i.e. Internet sources and produces extensively long posts, a skill I have yet to learn as far as this blog goes. Every now and then, actually more than now and then recently, the blog has posts on supply chain issues and today I stumbled upon a June 2010 post on supply chain risk management, where he explains how cost-cutting can be the supply chain’s worst enemy. This is the first time I have spent some considerable time on DeAngelis’ blog, and it is not going to be the last time.

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Christchurch earthquake and transportation

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Christchurch, New Zealand, has been hit by an earthquake. Having spent some time living there myself, I can only imagine the damage to the buildings familiar to me, as I scour the news for the most recent photos and reports. Judging from the news images and videos of the Christchurch earthquake, the damage seems severe enough in places. How will the city recover? Will they be able to pull together the resources and quickly return to business as usual? I believe they will, because some years ago New Zealand started a project called “Resilient organisations“. Will it work? This is the ultimate test, perhaps sooner than they planned.

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State of the art in SCRM?

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

A severe supply chain disruption has hit my own blog: More than a month without a post. It’s not that there is so little to write about, it’s just that there is so little time to do it, which is why I’ve decided to reurn to a once weekly posing schedule. Nonetheless, what better occasion could there be to resume my posting than the discovery of an article proclaiming to provide a review of the state of the art in supply chain risk management? The literature review and conceptual framework developed by Hans-Christian Pfohl, Holger Köhler and David Thomas clearly identifies the main principles of SCRM and develops a framework and definitions for disturbance, disruption, security, resilience and risk. Supply chain risk management, so they say, is a process with evolutionary steps, involving no less than 17 underlying principles. Phew…

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What goes into resilience?

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

Resilience. That seems to be the buzzword these days. It seems to be making its way not only around the blogosphere, like on Ken Simpson’s blog, but also in the supply chain and logistics literature. In Ensuring supply chain resilience: Development of a conceptual framework, just out in the Journal of Business Logistics, Timothy J Pettit, Joseph Fiksel and Keely L Croxton develop a concept of supply chain resilience based on an extensive literature search and a focus group study. And quite frankly, this is one of the the better and most comprehensive frameworks for understanding resilience that I have seen, drawing on the quintessence of many years of supply chain risk research. Resilience, in essence, is bridging vulnerabilities by honing capabilities.

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Supply Chain Risk Webinars

Revised on: 2015-09-12

I’ve never given much though to webinars as a means of communication, as blogging is my force, although I do have a lecture on supply chain risk, but not in webinar style. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider. I just recently became aware of WTG Webinar, a website that caters to the business community and serves webinars by highly acclaimed speakers on management and supply chain issues, thus bringing the world of thought leadership and insider industry knowledge directly to your desktop. So, what’s in store at WTG Webinar?

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Community resilience in times of disaster

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Revised on: 2015-09-08

Can public-private partnerships improve community resilience? This question is posed in Leveraging public-private partnerships to improve community resilience in times of disaster, written in 2009 by Geoffrey Stewart, Ramesh Kolluru and Mark Smith, three researchers from the National Incident Management Systems and Advanced Technologies Institute (NIMSAT). The answer: In order to achieve community resilience public and private owners of critical infrastructures and key resources must work together, before, during and after a disaster.

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Resilience Lessons from the Haiti Earthquake

Revised on: 2011-03-22

The recent earthquake in Haiti is a poignant reminder of how vulnerable a country is when it is facing disaster on a grand scale. To me, it is a reminder that that while natural disasters are not man-made, the aftermaths and consequences of the disasters often are. Disasters like this call for resilience in all parts of the community, including the infrastructure, the supply chains and society as a whole. Some of the older posts on this blog , and which do not see daylight too often may shed some light on this.

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Blog Review: Contemplating…Ken Simpson

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Revised on: 2011-08-26

It’s Friday, and I think I’m going to make Fridays a day for blog reviews and other “lighter” and “casual” subjects. Today’s blog is Ken Simpson’s Contemplating… blog, a rather recent addition to the business continuity blogging world – the first post is dated November 20th this year. Actually it’s not so much about just business continuity, but about resilience, a topic I have a strong inclination towards, next to supply chain risk. Ken’s blog is a must read for the business continuity professional seeking a wider perspective on what resilience actually means.
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Risk and resilience in maritime logistics

Revised on: 2015-09-26

This week’s focus are risks in the maritime supply chain and today’s paper sets out a framework for risk, vulnerability and resilience in maritime supply chains. Coping with risk in maritime logistics, by Bjørn Egil Asbjørnslett and Hallvard Gisnaas, is a conference paper, presented at ESREL 2007, the European Safety and Reliability Conference, in Stavanger, Norway, 25-27 June 2007. Asbjørnslett is not a newcomer to this blog; I have previously reviewed some of his works on the vulnerability of production systems. He is also a proponent of supply chain risk and a member of ISCRIM, and it was while trying to find more of his publications that I stumbled upon the 2007 conference paper. The contents were both surprising and unsurprising.

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Sheffi’s Resilient Enterprise and supply chain risk

Revised on: 2015-09-09

It is unfortunate that many companies still leave risk management and business continuity to security professionals, business continuity planners or insurance professionals. So say Yossi Sheffi and James B Rice in their 2005 article A Supply Chain View of the Resilient Enterprise. It is unfortunate that it is this way, because building a resilient enterprise is an enterprise-wide undertaking that is about so much more than simply preparing a company for disruptions.

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Are roads more important than computers?

Revised on: 2015-09-10

Critical Infrastructure. Which is more important – or ‘critical’ – road networks or computers? What if one day you could no longer use your computer or the Internet for one month, but you could still go anywhere by car? Or what if one day you could no longer go anywhere by car for one month, but you still had your computer or the Internet up and running, which would be worse? I would rather live without computers than without roads…

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Engineering transportation lifelines

Revised on: 2011-02-25

New Zealand is probably not the fist country that comes to mind when thinking of state-of-the-art transportation lifeline engineering. Nonetheless, I think it is time to consider New Zealand as being one of the countries at the very forefront. A 2008 research project, initiated by the New Zealand Transport Agency, provides a close look at how New Zealand practices lifelines engineering. The report is well-written, to the point and provides insight sand recommendations that are applicable not only to New Zealand, but to road and transport authorities anywhere.

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Robustness, resilience, flexibility and agility

Revised on: 2015-10-04

Several “buzzwords” have been linked to supply chain risk management (SCRM) in various ways: robustness, flexibility, agility and resilience. These concepts are often confused, and thus, warrant further explanation. They are distinctively different, and which strategy that works best would depend not only on the supply chain in question as a whole, but also which part of the supply chain that may be vulnerable. That is why it is useful to look at what sets one apart from the other.

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Book Review: Managing Risk and Resilience in the Supply Chain

Revised on: 2015-10-14

This book is a gem. To me. Where Helen Peck in her article Reconciling supply chain vulnerability, risk and supply chain management takes a holistic academic perspective on supply chain risk and business continuity, the late David Kaye in his book Managing Risk and Resilience in the Supply Chain takes on a holistic business perspective to explain the concept of the extended supply chain. Seldom have I read a book that captured my attention from the beginning to the end. It is not a textbook for the academic, nor is it a handbook for the manager, but it is an easy read.

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Interpreting Resiliency

Revised on: 2015-09-03

In yesterday’s post on Freight Transportations Systems Resilience I mentioned Kelly Pitera and her Master’s thesis, Interpreting Resiliency: An Examination of the Use of Resiliency Strategies within the Supply Chain and Consequences for the Freight Transportation System, where she explored and evaluated resiliency efforts currently being used by importing enterprises, focusing on goods movement within the supply chain. Today I will take a closer look at his thesis since it comes up with a novel and conceptually intriguing perspective on strategies for supply chain resilience.

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What is Freight Transportation System Resilience?

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

Resilience is the new buzzword in Supply Chain Management, and has slowly trickled into transportation research as well. When attending the TRB Annual Meeting in January this year, to present my paper on Supply Chain Disruptions in Sparse Transportation Networks, I came across a couple of interesting papers which I will review in my upcoming posts. First up is Structuring a definition of Resilience in the Freight Transportation System by Chilan Ta, Kelly Pitera and Anne Goodchild from the University of Washington, Seattle, WA. What I enjoyed with this paper was their holistic approach towards resilience, including all major stakeholders.

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Assess the vulnerability of your production system

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Revised on: 2015-09-08

So far I have reviewed “international” literature and web sites, and it is only fitting that now it is time for the Norwegian “domestic” literature to be reviewed. Assess the vulnerability of your production system was written back in 1997, by Bjørn Egil Asbjørnslett and Marvin Rausand, both now high-profile academics within risk analysis in Norway.

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