Blog Archives

Control or laissez-faire?

Supply networks are constantly changing. Perhaps not controlling, but letting things happen and letting supply networks emerge is the best management strategy?

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Risk and Vulnerability in Virtual Enterprise Networks

Conceptual in its approach and drawing from other areas of research, this chapter introduces four distinct groups of VENS, namely Constrained, Directed, Limited and Free VEN, and concludes that VEN risk management can and should learn from supply chain risk management.

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Published. Not perished.

Publish or perish? Publish. It has taken its time, but finally it is there, the book that has my chapter in it. This book links Virtual Enterprise Networks with Supply Chain Management and Risk Management in a cross-disciplinary fashion.

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The Definition of Agility

This blog has previously reported profusely on flexibility, let alone resilience and robustness, but has severely neglected agility. With this post, I intend to take a closer look at what it means to be agile. This is the only reference I have found that properly differentiates between agility and flexibility and what being agile actually entails.

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Supply Chain Flexibility in Strategic Networks

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.

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Risks in virtual enterprise networks and supply chains

Conceptual in its approach and drawing from other areas of research, this paper introduces four distinct groups of VENS, namely Constrained, Directed, Limited and Free VEN, and concludes that VEN risk management can and should learn from supply chain risk management.

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Structural embeddedness and the extended supply chain

We need to consider how a supplier is embedded in its own networks if we are to truly gauge its performance.

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Book Review: Virtual Teams

What is comes down to is that virtual teams have six challenges: Distance, Time, Technology, Culture, Trust and Leadership. Jill Nemiro and her co-editors have put together a 764-page monster of a book. It’s not a handbook, it’s a handbrick.

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Book Review: Cooperative Strategy

This book describes six reasons why firms seek to establish cooperative networks: 1) Certainty 2) Flexibility 3) Capacity 4) Speed 5) Skills and Competence 6) Intelligence. Five degrees of networks can be discerned: 1) Equal-partner network 2) Unilateral agreements 3) Dominated network 4) Virtual corporation, and 5) Strategic alliance.

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Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks

I must admit that I knew very little, if anything, about Virtual Enterprise Networks when I started this adventure some months back, but I can now say that I am fascinated by the concept

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Jumpstart your VEN adventure

A VEN is a way for businesses to achieve virtual scale, enabling it to operate as if it possesses more resources and capacity than it actually has within its own physical organizations.

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Understanding risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks

I am currently writing a book chapter for the book Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks: Implementing Supply Chain Principles, which is about risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks (VENs).

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ARTICLES and PAPERS
What is Freight Transportation System Resilience?
Resilience is the new buzzword in Supply Chain Management, and has slowly trickled into transportati[...]
Ericsson versus Nokia - the now classic case of supply chain disruption
When faced with a supply chain disruption, proactive and reactive supply chain risk management can i[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book Review: Supply Chain Risk Management
This excellent book by Donald Waters, Supply Chain Risk Management: Vulnerability and Resilience in [...]
Risk Management in Maritime Transportation Networks
This week’s focus are risks in the maritime supply chain, and today's article introduces a new metho[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
A Decade of Living Dangerously
Do you remember the movie The Year of Living Dangerously with Mel Gibson? Topically unrelated maybe,[...]
Supply chain disruption risk on the rise
Global supply chains are increasingly becoming more vulnerable to potential disruption to trade, say[...]
from HERE and THERE
Flexibility and robustness as options to reduce risk and uncertainty
Any company operating in international markets will face a multitude of risks. Acknowledging these r[...]
Migrants and European supply chains
Truckers caught up in Europe's migrant crisis say business is increasingly disrupted by queues and s[...]