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.

Posted in BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
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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.

Posted in my PUBLIC PRESENCE
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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
Outsourcing – risking it all?
"The world is at risk and the supply chain is not exempt." Are you scared? "Supply risk used to be d[...]
Humanitarian aid is better when decentralized
Humanitarian operations rely heavily on logistics in uncertain, risky, and urgent contexts, making t[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book review: The Network Reliability of Transport
I guess you would have to have attended the conference yourself or be a researcher in this very fiel[...]
Book Review: Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability
Another book by someone from the ISCRiM group? No, not this time, or perhaps, yes, after all. Managi[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
Risky cities - want to work there?
If you are doing global business, do you know where you are at risk and what risk that is most perti[...]
How New Zealand develops resilient organisations
Is New Zealand better prepared for a disaster than other countries? As our infrastructure and organi[...]
from HERE and THERE
How Effective Pallet Management Can Benefit the Full Supply Chain
pps pallet pooling
One seemingly small link in the supply chain of goods is pallets; those little timber crates on whic[...]
Impact assessment of road transportation projects
The idea of an impact assessment, often also referred to as cost-benefit analysis, is to assess all [...]