Tag Archives: supply chain visibility

Security, visibility and resilience

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

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.

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Shrink Shrank Shrunk

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

A missed classic? Perhaps, because after reading this article I realized that this in many ways is a seminal paper. Rachel Mason-Jones and Dennis Towill are not unknown to me, and I’ve come across their names time and again, but this is probably the first time I delved more deeply into their research and their journal articles. Their 1998 paper Shrinking the Uncertainty Circle is one of the articles – if not the article – that paved the way for many frameworks for risks in supply chains, most notably the supply-demand-process-control model found among Martin Christopher and his followers.

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Supply Chain Confidence

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Did a 2001 white paper turn into a 2004 academic journal article just like that? In Mitigating supply chain risk through improved confidence, Martin Christopher and Hau Lee explore the impact confidence has on supply chain performance. Although difficult to precisely quantify, the confidence factor can have significant impact on inventory levels and operating costs, they say. Interestingly this 2004 article also appears as a 2001 white paper on supply chain confidence published by the Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum. Is the journal article just a re-published white paper?

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The supply chain of the future

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Revised on: 2011-03-10

A recent report by IBM, referenced by Supply Chain Digest in IBM Lays Out its Vision for the Supply Chain of the Future, makes a compelling argument for how future supply chains  should be:  instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. The article features an interesting table, where these three characteristics are linked to SCM competencies and how they can be implemented.

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Business Intelligence – a key element in Supply Chain Risk Management

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Revised on: 2011-02-28

In my postings on supply chain risk and supply chain disruption, there is one thing that I have overlooked: Business Intelligence. Well, not overlooked, maybe, but underestimated, because Business Intelligence is a key component in mitigating supply chain risk and also a key component in recovering critical information after a supply chain disruption. Now, there are two ways business intelligence can be managed: in-house and out-house or on-demand. In this post I will look at at on-demand complementary business intelligence, using the solution provided by Oco as an example.

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Supply Chain Visibility through Web Conferencing

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Revised on: 2011-05-24

It’s weekend and time for some reflections. Maybe slightly off-topic for this blog, but the other day I came across “Web Conferencing”, a feature-rich full web collaboration service, and it occurred to me how useful this tool is in Supply Chain Management. One of the core strategies in Supply Chain Risk Management is to increase Supply Chain Visibility, because optimizing individual links in a supply chain is of limited value if these individual links have little or no visibility of what is happening upstream and downstream. This will also assist in achieving Supply Chain Confidence, since all partners, stakeholders and operators within the Supply Chain are aware of each others whereabouts and doabouts, so to speak.

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