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
Accessibility Index - Transport Network Vulnerability
Taylor, M., Sekhar, S., & D'Este, G. (2006). Application of Accessibility Based Methods for Vulnerability Analysis of Strategic Road Networks Networks and Spatial Economics, 6 (3-4), 267-291
I had the pleasure of meeting M.A.P. Taylor at the 3rd International Symposium on Transport Network [...]
Robust, Resilient and Secure
Antagonistic threats against supply chains are a special and limited array of risks and uncertaintie[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Appetite versus Attitude
Finally, and long overdue, another review in the Gower Short Guide to Business Risk book series. Thi[...]
What are Logistics Clusters?
This is a guest post by Professor Yossi Sheffi, Director, MIT Center for Transportation & Logist[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
Risk management - Vocabulary
What is risk management in supply chains? The more I study supply chain risk management, the more co[...]
28 Global Risks in 2015
The  World Economic Forum Global Risks Reports. I first came across them in 2008, when the hyperopti[...]
from HERE and THERE
Supply chains compete, not companies
"Supply chains compete, not companies" is the motto on Martin Christopher's web site, www.martin-chr[...]
Robustness, flexibility and resilience
In a previous paper, back in 2004, I discussed the issue of Flexibility and robustness as options to[...]