Tag Archives: risk management

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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Toy stories: lessons to be learned

Revised on: 2015-09-08

Christmas. Toys. Two things that belong together. But it isn’t always a happy story. Not only do seasons play a big role in supply and demand, so do fads; what is popular today may not be so anymore tomorrow, and as if that wasn’t enough to cope with, product safety issues are probably keeping more CEOs up at night than the unpredictability of sales figures. The year 2007 will be particularly remembered as the year the toy industry was shaken by a seemingly endless stream of recalls. Way ahead of this, in 2001, M Eric Johnson wrote Learning From Toys: Lessons in Managing Supply Chain Risk from the Toy Industry. Here he shows that how the toy industry handles supply chain risk is applicable to many other industries as well.

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German Autos at risk? Perhaps not.

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Revised on: 2015-09-22

The German automotive industry. Volkswagen, Mercedes, Porsche, Audi, BMW. The embodiment of craftsmanship, functionality and reliability. Cars that work and an industry that knows how to make it work. But how about supply chain risk management? Does that work equally well? That is what Jörn-Henrik Thun and Daniel Hoenig set out to investigate in daptive Fit Versus Robust Transformation: How Organizations Respond to Environmental Change. Interestingly, the results show that the group using reactive supply chain risk management seems to do better in terms of disruptions resilience or the reduction of the bullwhip effect, whereas the group pursuing preventive supply chain risk management seems to do better as to flexibility or safety stocks.

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Six levels of risk management

Revised on: 2015-09-10

In spite of all efforts to design safer systems, we still witness severe, large-scale accidents. A basic question is: Do we actually have adequate models of accident causation in the present dynamic society? That was the question asked by Jens Rasmussen in 1997 when he wrote Risk management in a dynamic society: a modelling problem. Here he argues that risk management includes several levels ranging from legislators, over managers and work planners, to system operators. Should supply chain risk management follow suit?

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Book Review: Security Risk Management – Body of Knowledge

Revised on: 2015-09-12

A Wiley book rarely lets you down, and this one doesn’t either. With a refreshing Australian touch, distinctively unlike many American books on the same subject, this 445-page heavy-weight of a book has it all. Security Risk Management – Body of Knowledge, written by Julian Talbot and Miles Jakeman, is a vast and practically all-encompassing repository of knowledge, filled with accepted best practices, innovations and research in the evolving field of security risk management. This book does not have a narrow scope, it is wide open, and it extends towards business continuity, resilience and even supply chain management.

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A new and better way of classifying and managing risks?

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Revised on: 2015-11-12

Risk. The probability of an event occurring and the consequences of the event occurring. That is how most of us would classify and compare risks in a scientific manner. Does it have to be like that or is there a different, or perhaps even a better way? Maybe there is. Ten years ago, Andreas Klinke and Ortwin Renn set out to do just that, in Precautionary principle and discursive strategies: classifying and managing risks. Here they developed an integral risk concept based on eight criteria for classifying and managing risk. A novel approach, but what happened to it?

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The world we live in: Risk Society

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

We live in a world that is full of risk, risks that we to a large degree have created ourselves, and where naturally occuring risk hardly exists anymore. That is a risk society. With that at the back of his mind, Jan Hovden of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, developed a framework that incorporates risk and vulnerability, that includes safety hazards and security threats and that adds both a micro and a macro perspective. It is a framework that fully accounts for most if not all of the risks that we have to face to a larger or lesser extent. Why is this framework not used more often?

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Can your business take a blow?

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Revised on: 2015-10-06

Are you prepared for whatever mishaps your business throws at you? If you’re not, you better start learning Dutch and you will be able to find out how you can better your resilience. Why? Because today’s post is based on a Dutch book I found the other day. Published in 2009, and written by Bart Lammers, Walther Ploos van Amstel and Pascal Eijkelenbergh, Risicomanagement en Logistiek translates as “Risk Management and Logistics” and is a short and succinct handbook that I wish will be translated into English soon. Why? Because this book contains an excellent new framework for logistics resilience and how to achieve it. I’ve done my best in translating the essential parts, but I could still use some help from my Dutch readers.

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Risky cities – want to work there?

Revised on: 2010-09-30

If you are doing global business, do you know where you are at risk and what risk that is most pertinent to that area? Most likely not, I would guess. AON, who in 2009 published the political risk map, identifying where supply chain risks are on the rise, has now published a people risk map that shows which countries are high or low risk. The accompanying report provides “a comparative overview of risks associated with recruitment, employment and relocation in 90 cities worldwide. These ratings enables companies to compare risk by location, identify the reasons for the risks, and determine actions to address these risks.” Is it as good as it sounds? Well, let’s have a closer look at the map and the report.

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Outsourcing – risking it all?

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

“The world is at risk and the supply chain is not exempt.” Are you scared? “Supply risk used to be defined as the potential for strikes by transport workers, fires at a key supplier’s plant, or missed deliveries. That simple vision no longer applies.” These pompous words mark the beginning of today’s article, Supply chain risk in an uncertain global supply chain environment, written by Jack Barry in 2004. His article raises some essential supply chain questions, and reminds us that global sourcing may be low cost, but not low risk.

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How Norwegian freight carriers handle disruptions

Revised on: 2014-07-30

Transportation networks, and in particular road networks are an integral part of supply chains, and in regions with sparse networks this road network becomes very important, since in a possible worst-case scenario no suitable alternative exists for deliveries to or from these communities. How are the supply chains of companies located in sparse transportation networks affected by transportation disruptions? What are typical disruptions in certain locations or for certain types of business, and how do businesses and carriers counter supply chain disruptions? Are bad locations synonymous with bad logistics?

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Not all risk is risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-22

I had planned to post this yesterday, when I was taken by surprise by the most severe supply chain and transportation disruption ever to hit Norway and much of Northern Europe: Volcanic ash from Iceland grounds all Norwegian air traffic, and it’s not over yet. Today appears to become another day with no air traffic in my neck of the woods and the social impact is widely felt, to say the least. And today’s post is by no means unrelated to air traffic. My latest favorite author, Terje Aven from the University in Stavanger, Norway, takes risk research to new heights in his most recent article from 2010. In How to define, understand and describe risk he contends that the uncertainty surrounding risk assessments is perhaps more important than the risk value itself.

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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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Published. Not perished.

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Revised on: 2015-11-23

Publish or perish? Publish. It has taken its time, but finally it is there, the book that has my chapter in it. Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks: Implementing Supply Chain Principles, edited by Stavros Ponis, aims to serve as a point-of-reference for scholars and researchers who are interested in studying Risk Management in a cross-disciplinary fashion, linking Virtual Enterprise Networks with Supply Chain Management and Risk Management. I am proud to be able to contribute of this attempt at cross-fertilization between three distinctively different, yet highly interconnected fields of research.

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Book Review: Managing Risk and Security

Revised on: 2015-09-10

One of my readers suggested this book to me via a comment on my supply chain literature list pages, so I decided to find a copy for a proper review. Stephan M Wagner and Christoph Bode are renown authorities within supply chain risk research and as editors for Managing Risk and Security they have come up with a book that focuses specifically on security risks, as seen from the perspective of logistics service providers. And indeed, it was a suggestion well worth investigating, as supply chain security is something that every supply chain manager needs to take seriously.

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Contingent flexibility

Revised on: 2015-09-10

Can contingency planning increase flexibility and minimize risk exposure to supply chain disruptions? Obviously yes, but what is it about the contingency planning process that relates to flexibility? That question is asked by Joseph B Skipper and Joe B Hanna in Minimizing supply chain disruption risk through enhanced flexibility. Surprisingly, this article suggests that only very few variables of contingency planning are positively related to flexibility…puzzling, isn’t it?

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Managing supply chains in times of crisis

Revised on: 2015-09-11

How do you prepare a supply chain for a crisis, and how do you manage a supply chain when the unexpected hits you? While not providing a direct answer to this question, a group of researchers from the Texas A&M University, has scoured some 118 peer-reviewed and published articles and come up a classification scheme I think is excellent. In Managing supply chains in times of crisis: a review of literature and insights, the three, Arunachalam Narayanan, Ismail Capar and Malini Natarajarathinam use 5 factors and 15 subfactors to separate the chaff from the wheat.

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Risk Disablers

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

My latest acquaintance in supply chain risk research methodology is developing drivers and dependants using interpretive structural modelling (ISM). A good example was provided by the trio of Mohd Nishat Faisal, D.K. Banwet, and Ravi Shankar, which I presented last week when I reviewed their paper on information risks management. As I found out, they used ISM in a previous paper written a year earlier, Supply chain risk mitigation: modeling the enablers, looking specifically (or perhaps more generally) at enablers of supply chain risk mitigation. Again, a fascinating article…

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Certain death: Not risky. Uncertain death: risky.

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

If you know for sure that things will go wrong, there really is no risk. If you don’t know for sure that things will go wrong, then there is a risk. That’s the basic assumption in a paper I just read, titled Identification of safety and security critical systems and activities and written by Terje Aven in 2009. It may sound like a bold statement, but technically speaking, it is a true statement. It is only when the consequences of actions and events are uncertain that these actions and events are truly risky. Agree?

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Information Risk Management

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Openness, partnering, trust and particularly sharing of information has often been cited as one way to reduce supply chain risk. The more you know, and know early enough, the less surprised you may be about unforeseen developments. However, information sharing has its own set of risks. Information risks management in supply chains: an assessment and mitigation framework by Mohd Nishat Faisal, D.K. Banwet, and Ravi Shankar provides a well-founded theoretical framework for assessing these risks.

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