Supply chain flexibility is a decisive factor in avoiding supply chain disruptions. One major contributor to supply chain flexibility is the flexibility of the logistics provider, and a recent paper develops the construct of transport flexibility within the context of supply chain strategy.
Companies should design their portfolios of manufacturing and supplier networks to minimize the total landed-cost risk under different scenarios. The goal should be identifying a resilient manufacturing and sourcing footprint—even when it’s not necessarily the lowest cost one today.
The norm in supply chain management is that variability is detrimental to performance as it causes cost in the form of stock-outs, poor capacity utilisation, and costly buffers. This paper questions this approach and argues that in the light of increasing turbulence a different approach to supply chain management is needed.
This book is about the principles, frameworks and processes that enable the aligning of a company’s specific customer value proposition with its operations strategy.The book is built around 33 rules that cover all possible aspects of supply chain operations and management, and that are placed throughout the eleven chapters of the book.
This is not so much a book about risk management in logistics, but more a book about resilience management in logistics, where the authors develop a brilliant framework for how to improve a company’s resilience.
Flexible supply chains can indeed “flex” their supply chain management muscles (pun intended) and show the strength that lies in them. With transportation being a key ingredient in any supply chain, much of this strength comes from flexibility in transportation.
Can contingency planning increase flexibility and minimize risk exposure to supply chain disruptions?
Can commercial logistics’ ideas and solutions work in humanitarian supply chains? No. Why? Well, perhaps they could work, but in most cases they won’t.
What fascinates me with this paper are (1) the parameters defining supply chain flexibility: Transparency, Simplicity, Responsiveness/Agility and Security/Reliability, and (2) flexibility potentials: Structural, Technological and Human flexibility potentials.
What do you do when you find two research papers by the same three authors, published the same year, in two different journals, with almost the same title?
Only by combining military and humanitarian supply chains, the strengths of both types of logistics can be exploited, and the extreme agility of rescue organizations can be matched with the extreme efficiency of the military.
How does company culture shape a firm’s risk mitigation and response, and thus, how does company culture shape a firm’s supply chain agility?
Building a resilient enterprise is an enterprise-wide undertaking that is about so much more than simply preparing a company for disruptions.
The key issue is to not make your supply chain one type only, but to keep it open-ended, such that the appropriate supply chain constellation can be matched to the according customer or supplier or product.
Someone had to come up with this, it was just a matter of time, and it is no suprise that this article comes from India, one of the major providers of global outsourcing for many industries.
These concepts are often confused, and thus, warrant further explanation. They are distinctively different.
When faced with a supply chain disruption, proactive and reactive supply chain risk management can in fact make or break a company’s existence.
Not only is a supply chain a network of interlinked actors, but the links (or relations, if you so wish) are constantly changing, with new ones appearing and old ones dissipating.
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. Actions to improve security can be classified into three categories: Physical security, Information security, Freight security. Actions to improve resilience can be be divided into: Flexibility, Redundancy.
In a previous post I discussed the issue of Flexibility and robustness to reduce risk and uncertainty. Since then a new term has emerged: resilience, and today I will take a look at that.
