Tag Archives: supply chain vulnerability

The supply chain of the future

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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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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Vulnerability in business relationships

Revised on: 2015-09-23

Today’s journal article review is an article by professor Göran Svensson from Halmstad University in Sweden. He is one of the first academic contributors to the field of supply chain risk, beginning around 1999. Vulnerability in business relationships was published in 2004, and it came to my attention because a lot of the literature on managaging an mitigating supply chain risk focuses on building relationships with suppliers. Trust and dependence are major components of a dyadic business relationship and therefore, important to discuss.

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7 out of 10 businesses without a continuity plan

Revised on: 2015-09-10

An article today in the paper issue of Dagens Næringsliv, the Norwegian equivalent of the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal, presents a survey among businesses considered to be part of the country’s critical infrastructure, saying that 7 out of 10 businesses do not have a contingency plan in case of ICT failure (Information and Communication Technology). This was a hot issue 10 years ago, when everybody was fearing the transition to Y2K, but since then complacency seems to have taken over. Maybe we take our computers and mobile phones so much for granted that we forget that they could fail?

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Book Review: Supply Chain Risk

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

A comment on a a previous book review – Supply Chain Risk Managament by Donald Waters – prompted me to write this review on a new book on supply chain risk which adresses the commenters concern, namely the lack of scientific or academic usefulness. Where Donald Water’s book was written with the manager in mind, this book – Supply Chain Risk – A Handbook of Assessment, Managment and Performance – by George Zsidisin and Bob Ritchie, is a collection of contributions from established and not so established, renown and not so well-known scholars and practitioners in the field of supply chain risk.

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Supply Chain Disruptions – Does Location Matter?

Revised on: 2011-08-03

How are companies located in sparse transport networks affected by supply chain disruptions? Here is a copy of the paper I presented at TRB2009, the Transportation Research Board 88th Annual Meeting, in Washington, DC, 11-15 January 2009. The paper was presented in a poster session and included as a full paper in the conference proceedings. For your convenience, both the paper and the poster are included below.

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TRB 2009 – are you going there, too?

Revised on: 2011-03-29

Are you presenting at the TRB 2009, the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting? Personally I consider presenting an article at TRB as only inches away from having an article published in an academic journal. The reason is that you have to submit a full paper, not just an abstract, which is then fully peer reviewed by at least three referees, thus ensuring the quality of the paper. Below is the abstract of a paper I will present at TRB2009, the Transportation Research Board 88th Annual Meeting, in Washington, DC, 11-15 January 2009.

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Ericsson versus Nokia – the now classic case of supply chain disruption

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Revised on: 2015-11-20

When faced with a supply chain disruption, proactive and reactive supply chain risk management can in fact make or break a company’s existence. One of the most famous (or rather infamous) cases is the fire at the Philips microchip plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2000, which simultaneously affected both Nokia and Ericsson. However, both companies took a very different approach toward the incident, and in hindsight, clearly displayed how to and how not to handle supply chain disruptions.

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Global Risks 2008 – A prediction come true

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Revised on: 2011-07-15

In my post on Hyper-optimization and supply chain vulnerability: an invisible global risk? I highlighted some of the issues in Global Risks 2008, a report prepared by the World Economic Forum. It is now frightening to see how true the predictions in this report were, in particular, how it predicted the current economic downturn. Maybe we should pay more attention to these reports?

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Overcoming locational disadvantage

Revised on: 2011-08-08

Following up my previous post, Sparse transportation networks – a recipe for supply chain disruptions?, when it comes to a business’ physical location in relation to the functioning of the supply chain, obviously there are good locations and bad locations. Can a business’ organization compensate for that? Yes – by either structuring its supply chain or honing its organization, thus going from badly located to well located and from badly prepared to well prepared.

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Sparse transportation networks and disruptions

Revised on: 2011-08-03

The vulnerability of the transportation network as part of the supply chain is of particular interest in countries or regions with sparsely populated areas, and hence, a sparse transportation network. Typically traits of such regions are few transportation mode options and/or few transportation link options for each transportation mode, for example maybe only one railway line and two roads, no port, no airport. It should not come as a surprise then that the nature of sparse transportation networks, and thus sparse supply chains, makes them vulnerable to many different kinds of internal and external risks.

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Sustainability means less vulnerability?

Revised on: 2015-10-24

Does sustainability improve a a company’s resilience towards supply chain vulnerabilities? Recently, in my research on supply chain vulnerability, I’ve come across the term sustainable supply chains. Curious as I am, and easily distracted by related topics, I decided to do some more digging, and this is what I came up with.

What are sustainable supply chains?

There are numerous definitions of the terms ‘Sustainable’ and ‘Supply Chain’, but in essence, this is a supply chain where the responsible manufacturer and retailer takes precedence over the green consumer. It is a supply chain, where resources are not just consumed but also replenished, and where business decisions consider long-term overall environmental and societal impacts. It’s not the opposite of just about business, but it is also not just about environment. It’s about

Profitability
Yes, we need to make money, but we should do so in a responsible way.
Accountability
Whatever we do, we will be held accountable for doing so.
Community
How can our business benefit the community (more than just providing jobs and tax money)?
Environment
Does our business harm the environment in any way?
Sustainability
Do we simply consume, or do we also replenish?

Conclusion

A sustainable supply chain is not primarily seeking to maximize profits.

It may not necessarily be less susceptible to disruption, but nonetheless, a disruption in a sustainable supply chain may be less likely to wreck widespread havoc, since a sustainable supply chain is not streamlined for profit, but is streamlined for resilience.

Links

sustainable-supplychain.com: Sustaina bility is free
The Sustainable Supply Chain Council: The Sustainable Supply Chain Project

Related posts

husdal.com: Sustainable supply chains

Inbound and outbound vulnerability

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

After publishing A conceptual framework for the analysis of vulnerability in supply chains, Gøran Svensson came up with a 2nd article along the same topic in 2002, entitled A conceptual framework of vulnerability in firms’ inbound and outbound logistics flows. The difference between the two papers is that while the former deals with the inbound flow only, the latter incorporates both the inbound and outbound flow.

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A conceptual framework for supply chain vulnerability

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Today’s article is one of the earlier works on supply chain vulnerability, published in 2000. A conceptual framework for the analysis of vulnerability in supply chains by Göran Svensson uses the Swedish car manufacturer Volvo as grounds for establishing his theoretical framework. This is the first of two papers on the same topic; this paper deals particularly with the inbound supply chain. A second paper, which I will review tomorrow, deals both with inbound and outbound logistics.

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America’s Crumbling Infrastructure

Revised on: 2015-11-17

My daily morning routine includes a cup of coffee while watching the World Business Report on BBC World News. Today they had a special report on America’s crumbling and failing infrastructure. The 2005 Report Card for America’s infrastructure issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) leaves no doubt: It’s a D. Is America’s critical infrastructure in critical condition?

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Drivers of supply chain vulnerability

Revised on: 2015-09-10

In 2005, the topic of supply chain vulnerability was still a relatively unexplored territory, though it was already in its ascendancy to becoming one of the major areas of management research. In her article Drivers of supply chain vulnerability: an integrated framework, Helen Peck identifies four drivers of supply chain vulnerability, based on an exploratory and empirically grounded case study of commercial supply chains.

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Finding the right location – minimizing disruption costs

Revised on: 2015-09-03

Classical facility location models assume that once optimally located and set up, facilities will operate as planned, smoothly, and without interruption. In reality, though, operations seldom go as planned; interruptions, unscheduled downtime and failures occur every once in a while, with unplanned and unbudgeted disruption costs as a consequence. Is it possible to know beforehand which locations that have the least disruptions costs?

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Accessibility Index – Transport Network Vulnerability

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Revised on: 2015-09-08

I had the pleasure of meeting M.A.P. Taylor at the 3rd International Symposium on Transport Network Vulnerability (INSTR 2007). His research has many bearings towards my own research in that it is concerned with transport network vulnerability in sparse rural and remote networks. In his 2006 paper, Application of Accessibility Based Methods for Vulnerability Analysis of Strategic Road Networks, Taylor and his fellow contributors develop a methodology for assessing the socio-economic impacts of transport network degradation by using the change in accessibility prior to and after degradation of the road network as a measure for the importance or criticality of the road link.

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How to Design Mitigation Capabilities

Revised on: 2015-09-26

There hasn’t been a literature review on this blog for a while, so it’s time to pick up where I left. Jumping from 1997 in review of Asbjørnslett’s “Assess the vulnerability of your production system” to 2007 in today’s review, I can tell that supply chain research has made a big leap forward. Today’s article presents six propositions that relate the severity of supply chain disruptions to supply chain design characteristics and supply chain mitigation capabilities, illustrating the connections between supply chain risk, vulnerability, resilience, and business continuity planning.

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Supply chain vulnerability: an invisible global risk?

Revised on: 2011-07-15

Supply chain disruption – a global issue? All companies and governments dependent on external suppliers are exposed to the risks of disruption in their supply chain. But the extent and complexity of current global supply chains mean that the problem of supply chain management is not limited to a single enterprise or industry: even a relatively small supply chain disruption caused by a global risk event may ultimately have consequences across the global economic system.

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