Tag Archives: resilience

Building a secure and resilient supply chain

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

Are you gambling with your supply network? You should be aware that the supply network is inherently vulnerable to disruption and the failure of any one element in it could cause the whole network to fail.  Current trends call for a supply network design that is both secure and resilient; that means a supply network that has advanced security processes and procedures in place, while at the same time being resilient enough to respond to unexpected disruptions and restore normal supply network operations.

In their article, “Building a secure and resilient supply chain“, James B. Rice and Federico Caniato point at a number of actions and responses to achieve supply chain resilience.

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Defining and Measuring Economic Resilience

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Revised on: 2011-04-19

Economic resilience, as defined a paper published by the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER), refers to the inherent and adaptive responses to  hazards that enable individuals and communities to avoid some potential losses. It can take place at the level of the firm, household, market, or macroeconomy.

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Robustness, flexibility and resilience

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Revised on: 2015-12-02

In a previous paper, back in 2004, I discussed the issue of Flexibility and robustness as options to reduce risk and uncertainty. Since then a new term has emerged: resilience, and today I would like to compare these three terms. Robustness is the ability to accommodate  any uncertain future events or unexpected developments such that the initially desired future state can still be reached. Flexibility is the ability to defer, abandon, expand, or  contract any investment towards the desired goal. Resilience is the ability of a system to return to its original state or move to a new desirable state after being disturbed.

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Three steps to make your supply chain less vulnerable

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Revised on: 2011-05-06

Some time ago, Jeff Karrenbauer, CEO of Insight Inc., a top international provider of supply chain planning solutions for the world’s foremost companies, wrote an article on How to Audit, Analyze, and Mitigate Supply Chain Vulnerability.  The article makes a strong case for every CEO of any company to demand a comprehensive supply chain risk audit and a corresponding set of mitigation strategies immediately and wait until after disaster strikes only to realize that “we should (or could) have known better”. To make the supply chain more resilient, businesses need to do more than just think about the problem; they must prepare to act effectively.

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Book Review: Supply Chain Risk Management

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Revised on: 2011-03-12

This excellent book by Donald Waters, Supply Chain Risk Management: Vulnerability and Resilience in Logistics, offers a comprehensive overview of many important issues in managing supply chain risk. More than 15 case studies and a straightforward hands-on practical approach make this book an enjoyable read. I bought this book as a text book, and as such it does a great job. It is perhaps not so well suited for the academically inclined, or for researching supply chain risk, or perhaps it is indeed, as it lets you not forget the real world and its real problems.

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Book Review: The Resilient Enterprise

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Revised on: 2015-09-08

To me, this book by Yossi Sheffi was an eye-opener, not so much for it’s academic value, but for it’s “entertainment” value, “entertainment” as in “stop-you-in-your-tracks-and-make-you-think”-value. Excellently written, The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage does not necessarily provide concrete solutions for your own business, but it showcases how other companies, successfully or not, handled various crisis situations. Sheffi’s analysis of how and why things go wrong or right is spot on and to the point.

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Why we need to think the unthinkable

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Revised on: 2010-09-22

Immediately after September 11, 2001, “critical infrastructure” and “vulnerability” seemed to be the new buzzwords. More recently “resilience” has been added to that list, and for a good reason. In a business sense, resilience is the ability to recover from any unforeseen event and how quickly one can return to normal day-to-day operations. Probably the most vulnerable and most critical infrastructure in our time are global computer networks, such as the Internet.

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Supply Chain Management – Emergency Management

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Revised on: 2011-08-01

Yes. No doubt about it. Reduction, Readiness, Response and Recovery are four key elements in the New Zealand Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002. But how can this be related to supply chain management? Well, from time to time any supply chain will face the possibility of being disrupted, severed, delayed or severely impacted.

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How New Zealand develops resilient organisations

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

Is New Zealand better prepared for a disaster than other countries? As our infrastructure and organizations become ever more networked and interdependent there is a growing need to focus on managing overall system risk. In particular, there is a need to focus not only on the vulnerability of our systems to failure, but also on our ability to manage and minimize the impact of any failures. New Zealand has realized this and is currently halfway through a six year research project designed to assist organizations in recovering their economic competitiveness after hazard events.

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Flexibility and robustness as options to reduce risk and uncertainty

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Revised on: 2015-12-02

Any company operating in international markets will face a multitude of risks. Acknowledging these risks and devising a strategy for how to deal with these risks is a prerequisite for survival in today’s competitive market. Assuming that the task to come up with a new strategy implies that the old strategy has outlived itself or at least has proven itself wrong on too many occasions, the stage is now set for a new approach. This paper will first present the main risks that are facing any company. Then, the available options to reduce these risks will be considered. Finally, in relation to these risks, flexibility and robustness will be introduced as a tool to handle uncertainties (risks).

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