Tag Archives: supply chain disruption

Humanitarian aid is better when decentralized

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Humanitarian operations rely heavily on logistics in uncertain, risky, and urgent contexts, making them a very different field of application for supply chain management principles than that of traditional businesses. Decentralization, pre-positioning and pooling of relief items are key success factors for dramatic improvements in humanitarian operations performance in disaster response and recovery. So say Aline Gatignon, Luk N van Wassenhove and Aurelie Charles in their newest article, The Yogyakarta earthquake: Humanitarian relief through IFRC’s decentralized supply chain. I believe they are right.

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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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Less cost and less disruptions?

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Revised on: 2015-11-07

One of the regular readers of my blog alerted me to an article in the NY Times titled Slow Trip Across Sea Aids Profit and Environment. As it turns out the Danish shipping giant Maersk has halved its top cruising speed over the last two years, thus cutting fuel costs, cutting emissions and perhaps cutting disruptions costs, too? After all, if you know that your shipment will arrive late, you are perhaps less concerned with not being just in time?

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If the UK goes cold, blame me

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Still thinking about my recent post on the importance of security of supply, I first added salt and grit to the list of critical supplies for the UK. Now you can throw in gas, too. The BBC reports that National Grid has issued its latest “balancing alert” on gas supplies. These alerts are a signal to the market to increase gas supplies, and encourage electricity providers to use alternative fuels such as coal. It comes as low temperatures in the UK continued to drive demand, and as outages at the Norwegian gas facility Nyhamna continues. And what is my role here?

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No grit No roads No show?

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Today’s rather cryptic title reflects on the impacts of the current winter weather, and is a fitting follow-up to yesterday’s article on the security of supply. The UK transportation systems seems to be particularly suffering under heavy loads of snow, and now they seem to be running out of salt and grit for their snowed-in roads. No grit means no cleared roads means no one able to get anywhere and a no-show of people everywhere.

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Happy Holidelays!

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

The idea for this post came from a question on Linkedin: Holidays = Holi.delays? One thing is the usual Christmas/New Year slowdown. Add to that Global Warming suddenly giving the Copenhagen Agreement the cold shoulder, almost literally, causing severe weather all over Europe, the UK, and the United States, leaving travellers stranded on the Eurostar trains under the English Channel, prompting a major rethink of Eurostar’s customer service. People were stuck at airports like Frankfurt, Germany or Luton, UK. It’s the same scene everywhere, chaos, chaos and chaos and lots of people desperate to get home for the holidays. But what about their Christmas presents?

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Dignitary Visits and Supply Chain Disruptions

Revised on: 2011-03-22

Today is an important day here in Norway. Some Mr. Barack Obama comes for a visit to collect some Nobel Peace Prize, creating all sorts of havoc in the transportation system of our small capital along the way. I have a couple of friends who are flying out from Oslo airport this morning, five minutes before the scheduled arrival of said honored guest. I bet they and many other travellers will expect some heavy delays this morning.

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Mitigating supply chain disruptions

Revised on: 2015-09-03

How could I have missed this paper? I was preparing my 2009-lecture on supply chain risk for tomorrow and while looking for some YouTube videos on supply chain risk to spice up my 3-hour presentation, I came across a short snippet featuring Christopher Tang from UCLA, who was talking about three strategies for building a robust supply chain, related to (1) supply, (2) product, and (3) demand. The video does not refer to it, but fascinated as I was, I did some more digging and came up with his 2006 paper Robust strategies for mitigating supply chain disruptions, which list not three, but nine strategies. Continue reading →

Supply, Demand, and … “Miscellanous” Risk?

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

I’ve said so before, sometimes new articles are found in new and unlikely places. The other day I was proofreading the paper of a colleague and something caught my attention in her reference list. A brand new article, just out: Managing disruptions in supply chains: A case study of a retail supply chain by Adegoke Oke and Mohan Gopalakrishnan. Now, here was a chance to learn something new…so I thought, and so I did. However, I’m not sure I follow the authors in their risk categorization: supply, demand and “miscellanous” risk? What is this “miscellanous” risk?

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Bad locations = bad logistics?

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

How are companies located in sparse transport networks affected by supply chain disruptions? This article develops a new framework for the categorization of supply chains, and introduces the notion of the constrained supply chain. Within the constrained supply chain framework, a company can address its locational disadvantage by either redesigning the supply chain towards a better structure, in order to gain better location, or by redesigning the supply chain towards a better organization, in order to gain better preparedness.

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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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What’s so special about this Paul Kleindorfer?

Revised on: 2015-09-08

Apparently there must be something really special about Paul Kleindorfer. Otherwise there would be no reason for Morris A Cohen and Howard Kunreuther to write their tribute to him in their 2007 article Operations Risk Management: Overview of Paul Kleindorfer’s Contributions. But what is it that makes Paul Kleindorfer so interesting that it compelled these two authors to write a whole article about him?

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Catastrophic events in supply chains

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Revised on: 2015-09-26

After studying supply chain risk research for some time I have begun to realize that much of the supply chain risk literature lacks direction and that each researcher or strand of researchers have their own presuppositions as to what supply chain risk is and how it should be addressed. In Knemeyer, A. M., Zinn, W. & Eroglu, C. (2009) Proactive planning for catastrophic events in supply chains, fortunately, there is a clear direction for further research and practical application as to how companies can evaluate and plan for catastrophic risk in supply chains.

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Fragility and sustainability: emerging research areas?

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Should short-term loss-minimization and short-term profit maximization really be the driving force behind supply chain risk management? In their 2009 article Weak links in the supply chain: measuring fragility and sustainability, Peter Stonebraker, Joel Goldhar and George Nassos point at a emerging area of supply chain research: fragility and sustainability, and they develop a framework for understanding and measuring it. Conceptually intriguing, the paper weaves together corporate responsibility, supply chain disruptions and long-term supply chain sustainability in a holistic picture going far beyond much of the loss-oriented supply chain risk literature of recent years.

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Lean logistics = risky logistics?

Revised on: 2015-09-11

A posting on Evolving Excellence called Long is not Lean caught my attention the other day. The author was lamenting over an article in Logistics Management that talked at length about the Downside of Lean Logistics and how lean means a supply chain that is more prone to risks and disruptions. Naturally, since Evolving Excellence is all about “Thoughts on Lean Enterprise Leadership”, of course they stood up for lean and defended it vigorously, and thinking about it, I have to agree that it is true, a lean supply chain is not necessarily a risky supply chain.

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Avbrudd – Forsyningskjedens mørke side

Revised on: 2015-09-27

Selv om kostnadsreduserende tiltak og outsourcing kan ha klare fordeler har det å gi slipp på kontrollen med forsyningskjeden sine utfordringer. Vi møtte forsker Jan Husdal i Møreforsking Molde som blant annet jobber med sårbarhetsanalyser og risikohåndtering i forsyningskjeder. Denne artikkelen er hentet fra Logistikk & Ledelse nummer 3/2009. Les hele artikkelen her.

For my English readers:
This is an interview with me in a Norwegian trade journal for Logistics Management.

Supply chain disruption risk on the rise

Revised on: 2015-09-23

Global supply chains are increasingly becoming more vulnerable to potential disruption to trade, says Aon, one of the world’s leading providers of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage. Every year, Aon publishes a political risk map, and in 2009 the number of countries tagged with ‘supply chain vulnerability’ has increased from 38 to 54 due to risks ranging from government embargo or interference with a supplier through to strikes, terrorism and sabotage.

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Managing Disruption Risks in the Supply Chain – the DRISC model

Revised on: 2015-09-09

It is not often that I find a PhD dissertation that is excellently written and a joy to read, keeping my attention from beginning to end. The DRISC model by Ulf Paulsson is such a dissertation and it has been a great inspiration and a great reference to me. Ulf Paulsson is an Associate Professor at the Division of Engineering Logistics at Lund University, Sweden and he is the Editor of the ISCRIM Newsletter, which is how I came across the dissertation in the first place. What makes this dissertation so special?

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Fewer suppliers mean fewer choices for consumers

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

The financial crisis has created an supply chain crisis, says The Economist. As demand for cheap goods from China collapses in the West, one by one Chinese manufacturers go bust, which means that many companies are left without suppliers. What used to be a banking crisis is now a manufacturing crisis and may soon be a supplier crisis.

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The effects of brand reputation on supply chain risk

Revised on: 2011-03-28

The financial crisis has left the world in turmoil. Slowly but surely, the effects of one bankruptcy here and one insolvency there ripples through the system. Suddenly, what used to be solid businesses lose their long-term suppliers or customers. The latest to be hit is the Swedish automobile maker SAAB, who in the wake of the GM/Detroit crisis filed for restructuring in order to avoid full foreclosure. SAAB owes money to some 1400 debtors, and rumors have it that some suppliers have stopped deliveries because of delinquent payments, prompting others to do the same, causing production to stall…

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