Tag Archives: supply chain books

SC Design and Management

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Revised on: 2015-09-01

More than 500-page heavy and laden with real-life examples and thoroughly calculated details, Designing and Managing the Supply Chain by David Simchi-Levi, Philip M Kaminsky and Edith Simchi-Levi this an excellent textbook that will teach you much more than just supply chain design and management. This book takes on a unique approach, and teaches you how the supply chain is an integrated part of any business, not something added to it to make the business work. The supply chain is the business; if it is not properly designed and managed, there is no business. Thus, this book is more than just about supply chain management, it is about business management in a wider sense. Unfortunately though, supply chain risk does not feature very prominently in this book.

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Supply Chain Nirvana

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Revised on: 2015-09-16

Is there something like a Supply Chain Nirvana, where it all comes together and where a firm’s supply chain is perfectly aligned with its business strategy, thus creating the competitive advantage the firms needs to stay ahead of its rivals? Vivek Sehgal may have found the recipe in his latest book, Supply Chain as Strategic Asset. In this tightly packed 300-page volume Sehgal shows how important it is to have a top-down-driven approach to supply chain management and how important it is to link strategy and execution, from the board room to the very last delivery guy. The supply chain is a firm’s core asset, and perhaps its most important asset, and a firm is only as good or as bad as its supply chain. While a bit overwhelming at first, this book is filled with many important real-life lessons, and K-Mart versus Wal-Mart seems to be one of Sehgal’s favorite subjects.

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Book Review: Operations Rules

Revised on: 2011-07-14

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.
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Business Continuity in Global Supply Chains

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Revised on: 2011-02-17

Business Continuity is a crucial ingredient of supply chain management. At the same time, implementing business continuity principles in supply chains is really simple. So says Steve Cartland in his book chapter on Business Continuity Challenges in Global Supply Chains in the book titled Global Integrated Supply Chain Systems, published in 2006. Cartland’s chapter is the last of the 19 chapters in the book, and the only chapter touching upon business continuity. Unfortunately. I think this chapter should have been first.

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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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Book Review: The Geography of Transport Systems

Revised on: 2015-09-23

This is a book I’ve wanted to lay my hands on for a long time. The Geography of Transport Systems by Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Claude Comtois and Brian Slack is a book that every geographer with an interest in transportation should read. It is also a book that every transportationist with a sense for geography should read. Even if your main focus is just transportation and nowhere near geography, this book will fascinate, because it so brilliantly explains, explores, researches and reviews the spatial impact of transportation systems and how they have shaped the world that surrounds us. It is not often that I fall in love with textbooks at first sight, and this is a book that will not spend much time collecting dust in my bookshelf, as I will read and use it again and again…

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Book Review: Enterprise SCM

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Revised on: 2015-09-07

Have you ever played SimCity? I never liked Transport Tycoon that much, but I used to play SimCity a lot, and I still do on occasion, when my wife lets me have my own quality time, and maybe that’s why I fell for this book, because the cover picture looks exactly like a scene from SimCity. And in some ways the 2009 book Enterprise Supply Chain Management by Vivek Sehgal really is very “Sim”-like. The book’s focus are the nitty-gritty details of operations and logistics, the flows of ins and outs, while strategic oversight and decisions seem to play a less important role. But only seemingly.

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Book Review: HBR on Supply Chain Management

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Revised on: 2015-10-05

Today we continue my exploration of the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series that I started yesterday when I reviewed Managing External Risk, an enterprise-wide approach towards risk management. Today it’s back to basics: Harvard Business Review on Supply Chain Management. It was published in 2006, so it has been out there for a while, but I have been blissfully oblivious to it, preoccupied as I have been with other literature. Besides, the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series, as the “Paperback” in the name implies, are not written for us academics and researchers, but for the professional manager seeking executive perspectives and solutions.

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Risk Management in Global Supply Chain Networks

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Supply Chain Risks can be classified as either one of these three, Deviation, Disruption or Disaster, and can be approached using either a Preventive or an Interceptive approach; the former attempts to build in risk tolerance, the latter attempts to contain the damage or impact of an undesired event. So say N Visvanadham and Roshan S Gaonkar in Risk Management in Global Supply Chain Networks, a chapter in the 2008 book Supply Chain Analysis, edited, among others, by Christopher S Tang. Using this framework, the authors develop a simple integer quadratic optimization model that optimizes partner selection and minimizes operational cost variability.

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Book Review:Managing Risks in Supply Chains

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Revised on: 2015-09-13

To make up for yesterday’s perhaps overly harsh critique of just one article from this book, this is a full and proper content review. Managing Risks in Supply Chains: How to Build Reliable Collaboration in Logistics, edited by Wolfgang Kersten and Thorsten Blecker, is a collection of articles by various researchers from mostly Germany and Austria, and lo and behold, Marco Moder, whose PhD on Supply Frühwarnsysteme has been reviewed on this blog previously, is also among the contributors. This book has been out for a while, but I didn’t discover it until recently, and now my library finally bought a copy for me to read and review for the readers of my blog.

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One bad apple…

Revised on: 2015-09-10

…spoils the barrel? Yesterday I sat down to prepare a review of this book, Managing Risks in Supply Chains: How to Build Reliable Collaboration in Logistics, edited by Wolfgang Kersten and Thorsten Blecker. The book is a collection of articles by various researchers from mostly Germany and Austria, and while many of the articles/chapters maintain an excellent academic standard, one of the chapters does not at all hold up to any standard. In fact, it is so bad it makes me wonder how this could have slipped by editorial control?
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Book Review: Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Another book by someone from the ISCRiM group? No, not this time, or perhaps, yes, after all. Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability: Tools and Methods for Supply Chain Decision Makers by Teresa Wu and Jennifer Blackhurst sounds like ISCRiM, but it’s not. If it were, it should have been noted in the ISCRiM Newsletter, but it wasn’t. Nonetheless, several of the ISCRiM members have contributed to the chapters in this book, which is well worth taking a closer look at, particularly if risk modeling and decision-making is your field.

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Book Review: Single Point of Failure

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Just out a few days ago, Single Point of Failure is a fascinating read. The author, Gary S. Lynch, is Global Leader, Supply Chain Risk Management Practice at Marsh Consulting, so he knows what he is talking about. The book’s tagline reads “The 10 Essential Laws of Supply Chain Risk Management” and what Gary Lynch is trying to convey is that there are certain basics every manager should know, understand, and act upon. Lynch breaks down Supply Chain Management into ten basic laws, neither founded in academic theories or mathematical formulas, but simple basic principles that anyone can appreciate.

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Is Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment the way of the future?

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment. That is the magic formula that runs like a red thread through John Gattorna‘s latest book, where he demonstrates how there are four types of supply chains, based on four types of customer behavior. This is a well-written and excellently illustrated book, which I will take a closer look at, chapter by chapter, in order to answer the question: Is Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment the ultimate formula for streamlining your supply chain for the utmost performance?

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Book Review: Global Supply Chain Management

Revised on: 2015-09-11

The Handbook of Global Supply Chain Management is an excellent book. My interest in it stems from the fact that it contains a chapter on risk management. It was after reading Manuj and Mentzer’s articles on Global Supply Chain Risk Management and Global Supply Chain Risk Management Strategies that I came across this book, when searching for more papers from Mentzer and/or Manuj, and naturally, I decided to see if there was something on supply chain risk in it. There was.

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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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Book Review: Creative Destruction

Revised on: 2011-03-10

Like with so many of my other recent book reviews I came across Nolan and Croson’s book, Creative Destruction: A Six-Stage Process for Transforming the Organization when researching my book chapter on risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks. This book triggered my interest when I became aware of the concept of “creative destruction”, where some businesses must die for others to be (re-)born. Popularized by Joseph Schumpeter, “creative destruction” is a concept that makes perfect sense to me.

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Enterprise-wide Risk Management

Revised on: 2015-09-15

Coming from a crisis management and business continuity background, I really enjoyed reading Enterprise-wide Risk Management: Strategies for linking risk and opportunity by DeLoach has a refreshing new approach to risk management that is is cross-functional, integrated and adaptable in the face of constant change, simply because traditional risk management approaches are no longer adequate in today’s rapidly changing world in where traditional risk management is too fragmented and function-driven.

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Book Review: Cooperative Strategy

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Cooperative strategy is the attempt by organizations to realize their objectives through cooperation rather than in competition with them, focusing on the benefits of cooperation. I used Cooperative Strategy in preparing for my book chapter on risks in virtual enterprise networks, where two chapters in this book were particularly useful: Networks (Chapter 8) and Virtual Corporations (Chapter 9). My review focuses on these two chapters. I did browse the other chapters in the book, although I did not read them as intensively as chapter 8 and 9, which obviously were the chapters I read most.

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