Supply Chain Risk. Business Continuity. Transport Vulnerability. Resilience. Articles and papers. Books and book chapters. Reports and whitepapers. And more.
What are the Top of the Pops of Supply Chain Resilience papers? That could be the fitting title for A Citation Analysis of the Research on Supply Chain Resilience where Christian Wankmüller and Gottfried Seebacher analyse current and past literature and manage to find the 8 most cited and influential papers on supply chain resilience.
Below is a list of what they found to be the eight most cited papers in supply chain resilience research. Six of these have been reviewed on this blog, so I’ve done my homework well so to speak.
Unsurprisingly, it is Christopher and Peck (2004) that appears to be the most cited paper, 19 times since its publication. More surprising – to me – is Ponomarov and Holcomb (2009), a paper I haven’t heard about at all. Sheffi (2001) I have read, but never gotten around to review.
Critique
This is a good paper that is well-written and quantitative literature reviews like this one are always interesting. While the work and research leading up to papers like this one is perhaps boring and tedious and not building a new frontier or going where no man has gone before in this field of research, the result may be very rewarding to the reader like me who may find papers he has never heard of. And indeed, I did find new papers here that I must read.
However, if there is to be one bad apple that spoils the barrel it is the fact that not all literature from the above figure is mentioned in the references of this paper. Perhaps the authors thought that these were papers of less importance and not worth mentioning, I don’t know, but for the sake of accuracy I think they should have been mentioned. Fortunately I do know several of these “omitted” papers, but others I don’t, and finding them by the name of the author(s) and year of publication alone isn’t always easy.
Reference
Wankmüller, C. and Seebacher, G. (2015) A Citation Analysis of the Research on Supply Chain Resilience. Paper presented at the 22nd EurOMA Conference, June 26th – July 1st, 2015, Neuchatel, Switzerland
Antagonistic threats against supply chains are a special and limited array of risks and uncertainties that are demarcated by three key words: deliberate (caused), illegal (by law) and hostile (negative impact). In this paper, following up on Daniel Ekwall’s PhD thesis, Dafang Zhang, Payam Dadkhah and Daniel Ekwall suggest a suitable model of how to handle the risks and achieve security in a systematic and scientific way, where robustness and resilience play a major role.
Revisiting an old friend
I came across Daniel Ekwall some seven years ago when I found his PhD thesis that combined theories from criminology with theories from logistics and supply chain management to examine cross-over points or antagonistic gateways between legal and illegal logistics. In his thesis, Ekwall contended that there are basically two types of threats to logistics, theft/sabotage and smuggling. The theft/sabotage problem is directly aimed towards the logistics activities, while smuggling abuses the logistics system for illegal purposes. This paper takes this issue a small step further.
Finding myself
I guess I should have paid closer attention to Ekwall’s research and writings, because then I would have discovered this paper earlier and then I would have seen that which I now – if I may be a little presumptious here – can call my legacy within supply chain risk research, namely my illustration on the differences of robustness and resilience:
Back to the article in review, what the authors attempt to do – and succeed at, I must say – is to take current concepts and models of supply chain risk management, and adding supply chain security, not as a separate concept, but as a part of overall supply chain (risk) mangement. While most of the reviewed literature and quoted figures they highlight was quite familiar to, one figure taken from one book was new to me. This clear separation of suply chain risk and supply chain vulnerability and how they link up with risk management and decision-making is much in line with my own way of thinking:
On second thought, dwelling on why tis figure hasn’t caught my attention before, I suddenly realised that I had indeed reviewed the book it was taken from: Supply Chain Risk Management – Vulerability and Resilience in Logistics by Donald Waters. Admittedly, the reviw was done in 2008. Looking back at the review I did almost 8 years ago, I must have thought the book to be of too little academic value to me at that time.
Safety Net
Anyway, I’m sorry for digressing again, what the authors are investigating are what specific supply chain assets that are susceptible to antagonistic threats, and how supply chain security measures can apply robustness and resilience. They illustrate this with a focal model of Robustness and Resilience:
This model shows the relationship between strategies for robustness and strategies for resilience, as seen from a company perspective and from a security provider perspective.
In the company and transportation network perspective, every components of the supply chain should become robust and resilience. The robust strategy is to handle small risks ahead of the event, and manage regular fluctuations like some low impact with high likelihood accidents. Resilience strategy can help the companies adapt, improvise and overcome those disturbance and disruptions greater than the robust can handle. It helps the companies to survive after suffering from big risks and changes.
The right side of the model is further developed into what the authors call a “safety net” of services: site security, transportation security, emergency services, consultation services, and collaboration:
Site security is about protecting every node in the transferral of goods in the transportation network, e.g. warehouses, terminals, factories, and ports. Transportation security is about protecting the transportation as such, e.g. the vehicles en-roue and during parking, as well as the drivers. Emergency services provide a quick response in addition to security operations. Security providers can also act as professional consultants, and lastly, security providers are also likely to collaborate with other organisations to improve their own (and the others’) service level and the overall capability to thwart any security threats.
Conclusion and critique
Akward English sentences and lack of flow aside (see citation above), this article does have some good points. Supply chain security appears to be overlooked in supply chain risk management. However, supply chain security can add to the robustness and resileince of the overall supply chain, providing a “safety net” of services that protects, secures and enhances the overall supply chain operation.
The company versus security provider model brings together both sides of the perspective in a way that does create a consistent groundwork for building robustness and resilience. The safety net model extends beyond the supply chain and identifies the assets that need to be protected and how they can be protected.
However, after finishing reading my first thought was that there should have been a conclusion after the authors’ chosen conclusion, because the article seems to stop abruptly, leaving loose ends that could have been wrapped up a bit more, at least from an academic perspective.
That said, for a logistics and transportation manager this paper is well worth reading.
Reference
Zhang, D., Dadkhah, P. Ekwall, D. (2011) How robustness and resilience support security business against antagonistic threats in transport network. Journal of Transportation Security 3 (4) 201-219 DOI: 10.1007/s12198-011-0067-2
The 2015 FM Global Resilience Index provides an annual ranking of 130 countries and territories according to their business resilience to supply chain disruption. Presented both as a report and an online map it is a visually impressive way of conveying an important message: Beware of where you do your business. As to my home turf the report Norway retains its top position in the index from last year, with strong results for economic productivity, control of corruption, political risk and resilience to an oil shock.
The map
This is how the map looks like for 2015
It’s definitely intriguing to see which countries that rank at lower end and higher end of the resilience scale.
Comprehensive and complete?
Supply chain risk is one of the leading causes of business volatility, so says the report.
The FM Global Resilience Index is the first data-driven tool and repository that ranks the resilience of 130 countries and territories to supply chain disruption. It is designed to help executives evaluate and manage unknown risk potentially inherent in the countries they rely upon. Nine key drivers of supply chain risk are grouped into three categories: economic, risk quality and supply chain factors.
Well, lets take a closer look at how the index is calculated
Levels, factors and drivers
The index is calculated at three levels. Level 1 of the index provides a country ranking of business resilience to supply chain disruption. Level 2 comprises three factors, the core elements of resilience: economy, risk quality and supply chain. Level 3 includes a set of nine drivers that determine the business resilience to supply chain disruption for a country: GDP per capita, political risk, vulnerability to an oil shock, exposure to natural hazard, quality of natural hazard risk management, quality of fire risk management, control of corruption, infrastructure, quality of local suppliers:
I think this index does capture most of what goes into measuring resilience, although it’s hard to judge from the outside what actually goes into the calculations of levels, factors and in particular, the drivers. This is proprietary data. That said, I have no doubt that the scores are statistically sound and based on valid data.
Conclusion
In their own words, FM Global describes the index as
The index offers business executives an additional resource to help in prioritising supply chain risk management and guiding strategy in four key areas:
1. Selecting suppliers based on the supply chain risk/resilience of the countries in which they are located,
2. Deciding where to locate facilities,
3. Evaluating the resilience of the countries hosting existing facilities, and
4. Assessing the resilience of the countries where customers’ facilities are based.
In summary, the index provides a robust, composite view of business resilience to supply chain disruption around the world.
A bit of marketing here, but worth looking at, as an initial step in assessing one’s own supply chain resilience.
Following up last weeks post on a 2003 UK report on supply chain resilience, here is another “spin-off ” from the supply chain research done at Cranfield University: Building the resilient supply chain, written by Martin Christopher and Helen Peck in 2004. Since its inception this article has formed the bedrock for practically every literature review on supply chain resilience. Frankly, if you are investigating how to make supply chains more resilient, and if you forget to mention this article in your literature review, then I would say that obviously, you have absolutely no clue about supply chains or resilience.
This blog is about supply chain risk, business continuity and transport vulnerability, and while I have blogged profusely about supply chain resilience in a vast number of posts over the last 3 1/2 years, citing journal articles, book, papers and research reports en masse, one major reference – perhaps the major reference – has so far been omitted: Creating Resilient Supply Chains: A Practical Guide, published by the University of Cranfield in 2003. Commissioned by the UK Department of Transport, with Helen Peck as the principal researcher, the objective of the report is to increase awareness, understanding and thus the ability of UK industry to cope with disruptions to its supply chains. To that end it provides insight and practical tools, which will assist managers in improving the resilience of their organisation’s supply chain networks.
Today’s post is a review of a conference paper written by Francesco Longo and Tuncer Ören in 2008 and presented at a venue where I not would look for papers on supply chain risk: The European Modeling & Simulation Symposium. The paper is titled Supply chain vulnerability and resilience: a state of the art overview, and the main objective, obviously, is to provide the reader with a state of the art review current research on supply chain resilience. And frankly, the paper falls a bit short of doing just that, but it’s nonetheless a paper worth downloading and reading and pondering for any researcher in supply chain risk.
Is supply chain risk is now beginning to enter more and more areas of supply chain thinking? It would seem so. Yesterday’s I posted about a call for papers on supply chain risk in China, and three days ago I posted about a call for papers on global supply chain risk management. Today I have another one, so this is my third “call-for-papers”-posting in just four days. This time it is the well-known and renown International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics (IJPDLM) that is planning a Special Issue on papers dedicated to Applying service-dominant (S-D) logic to physical distribution and logistics management, among many others also including topics such as Supply network resilience and Natural disaster management in supply networks. This triggered my interest, but since I had never heard about S-D Logic before, I had to do some digging and googling first, so I could understand what it was that I would be promoting.
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. Continue reading →
The risk perception an individual supply chain professional has influences the risk management strategies this individual chooses to mitigate the effect of potential supply chain disruptions. But does risk perception influence the occurrence of disruptions? In other words, if you think you are at risk, are you actually more likely to experience disruptions than if you think you are not at risk? Enhancing supply chain resilience with flexibility and redundancy is one way to counter supply chain disruptions. But do the chosen resilience measures actually play a moderating role in reducing the frequency of supply chain disruptions? That is what George Zsidisin and Stephan Wagner investigate in their newest article, Do Perceptions Become Reality? The Moderating Role of Supply Chain Resiliency on Disruption Occurrence. This article paints an interesting picture of how supply chain professionals view risk, which risk they perceive and what they do in reaction to these risks.
Supply chain risk seems to be on everyone’s agenda these days, with one event after the other competing for spotlight attention. The Building a Resilient Supply Chain Summit, in New Orleans, 9-10 December 2010, is up next. This event, so the conference website says, is the must-attend event for senior supply chain executives looking to evolve their supply strategies to better respond to ever changing risks, market conditions and global compliance requirements. Well said, but that is not the reason why yours truly is promoting the event. My reason for blogging about it is the simple fact that they have an impressive list of related resources on the conference website: reports, articles, blogs (!), interviews and videos. Even if you’re not planning to attend the conference, then at least you should attend their website, which is full of valuable insights, some of which I will highlight in this post.
Have you heard of ISO 28002? No? You should take note of this standard, because the ISO 28000 series specifies the requirements for a security management system for the supply chain. The standards address potential security issues at all stages of the supply process, thus targeting threats such as terrorism, fraud and piracy. The most recent addition to the series is ISO 28002: Security management systems for the supply chain – Development of resilience in the supply chain, published in September 2010. ISO 28002 details how an organization can engage in a comprehensive and systematic process of prevention, protection, preparedness, mitigation, response, continuity and recovery. This post will take an inside look at ISO 28002 and highlight the essential content.
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.
The numerous possibilities of disruptions and disturbances in the supply chain demand a supply chain that is responsive to a variety of threats. A non-responsive and hence unreliable supply chain is by definition a vulnerable supply chain, and the keys or tools to mitigating supply chain vulnerability are security, visibility and resilience. So said Theodore Glickman and Susan White in 2006, when they published Security, visibility and resilience: the keys to mitigating supply chain vulnerabilities. Here they present a framework for how these three tools interact with seven basic supply chain concerns, and combined make up 21 considerations for improving supply chain reliability.
Resilience. That seems to be the buzzword these days. It seems to be making its way not only around the blogosphere, like on Ken Simpson’s blog, but also in the supply chain and logistics literature. In Ensuring supply chain resilience: Development of a conceptual framework, just out in the Journal of Business Logistics, Timothy J Pettit, Joseph Fiksel and Keely L Croxton develop a concept of supply chain resilience based on an extensive literature search and a focus group study. And quite frankly, this is one of the the better and most comprehensive frameworks for understanding resilience that I have seen, drawing on the quintessence of many years of supply chain risk research. Resilience, in essence, is bridging vulnerabilities by honing capabilities.
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.
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?
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.
Can public-private partnerships improve community resilience? This question is posed in Leveraging public-private partnerships to improve community resilience in times of disaster, written in 2009 by Geoffrey Stewart, Ramesh Kolluru and Mark Smith, three researchers from the National Incident Management Systems and Advanced Technologies Institute (NIMSAT). The answer: In order to achieve community resilience public and private owners of critical infrastructures and key resources must work together, before, during and after a disaster.
This week’s focus are risks in the maritime supply chain and today’s paper sets out a framework for risk, vulnerability and resilience in maritime supply chains. Coping with risk in maritime logistics, by Bjørn Egil Asbjørnslett and Hallvard Gisnaas, is a conference paper, presented at ESREL 2007, the European Safety and Reliability Conference, in Stavanger, Norway, 25-27 June 2007. Asbjørnslett is not a newcomer to this blog; I have previously reviewed some of his works on the vulnerability of production systems. He is also a proponent of supply chain risk and a member of ISCRIM, and it was while trying to find more of his publications that I stumbled upon the 2007 conference paper. The contents were both surprising and unsurprising.
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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