Supply Chain Risk. Business Continuity. Transport Vulnerability. Resilience. Articles and papers. Books and book chapters. Reports and whitepapers. And more.
Resilience Adviser or Scaremonger? What am I really? That is what started to ask myself after I came across an article written by Frank Furedi the other day. In the article, Furedi, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, highlights the issue of vulnerability-driven policies and how possibilistic (worst likely) risk thinking has dethroned probabilistic (most likely) risk thinking. Why is it that we fear so much?
And the overemphasis on possible risks rather than probable risks is exactly what Furedi tackles head-on in this article Precautionary Culture and the Rise of Possibilistic Risk Assessment. Written in 2009, it is probably or possibly (pun intended) even more valid today than it was back then.
The shift from probabilistic to possibilistic risk management characterises contemporary cultural attitudes towards uncertainty. This shift in attitude is paralleled by the growing influence of the belief that future risks are not only unknown but are also unknowable.
Future risks – to many people – are not only uncertain, but also unknowable. So, while probable, but uncertain risks is something we can learn to live with, possible and unknown risks – and even worse: unknowable risks – are almost too much to bear.
The shift towards possibilistic thinking is driven by a powerful sense of cultural pessimism about knowing and an intense feeling of apprehension about the unknown. The cumulative outcome of this sensibility is the routinisation of the expectation of worst possible outcomes. The principal question posed by possibilistic thinking, ‘what can possibly go wrong’, continually invites the answer ‘everything’. The connection between possibilistic and worse-case thinking is self-consciously promoted by the advocates of this approach.
One of the defining features of our times is that anxiety about the unknown appears to have a greater significance than the fear of known threats. This constant feeling of anxiety is typical of today’s risk society, a society I wrote about risk society in a post 5 years ago: According to sociologist Anthony Giddens a risk society is increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), thus generating the notion of ubiquitous risk in whatever direction we look. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck defines it as a society that while hailing technology and innovation at the same time seeks to deal with the hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by technology and innovation itself. In other words, we’re more concerned with whatever possible bad that comes with the good than trying to assess how bad the bad really is, if at all.
Time and again the public is informed that the most dreadful dangers are not just ones that we cannot predict or anticipate but ones about which we cannot say anything because they are literally unknown. […] The traditional association of risk with probabilities is now contested by a growing body of opinion that believes that humanity lacks the knowledge to calculate them.
So instead of applying all our science and all our knowledge to close in on the most probable risks, the much easier solution is to home in on all possible risks, or better, on the most feared risks. It’s a vicious circle, because the less we know about a risk, the more we fear it, and the more we fear it, the more we want to deal with it, without investigating it, because it could happen any time, probable or not.
The future of the world appears to be a far darker and frightening one when perceived through the prism of possibilities rather than probabilities. Probabilities can be calculated and managed, and adverse outcomes can be minimised. In contrast, worse-case thinking sensitises the imagination to just that – worst cases.
Worse-case thinking, so Furedi, encourages society to adopt fear as of one of the dominant principles around which the public, its government, and institutions should organise their life. Insecurity is institutionalised and worst-case scenarios are thought of as so normal that people feel defenceless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats.
Furedi describes this overemphasis on possible threats instead of probable threats as “the devaluation of knowledge and the enthronement of ignorance”. We are ignorant because we prefer not to know about (the probability of) the risks, they are simply there, that is enough for us. Worst case risks are what drives our policies, not the actual risk.
And I?
Furedi does have point. In my attempts to convince my own management that we need to have crisis management plans and conduct emergency drills I must admit that I often resort to worst case scenarios. That said, the realisation is dawning on me that crisis management plans and drills need to be based on (f)actual and probable threats, not on fear alone.
Reference
Furedi, F. (2009) Precautionary Culture and the Rise of Possibilistic Risk Assessment. Erasmus Law Review 2(2), 197-220. DOI: 10.553/ELR221026712009002002005
Is my idea of how to differ robustness from flexibility from agility from resilience – hallmark of my research ideas – in any way related to the ideas of Nassim Taleb, Crawford Stanley Holling and Gary Hamel? Well, Sinan Si Alhir certainly thinks so, on a blog post that he wrote back in 2013, when he explored Taleb’s concept of Fragility and Antifragility. Interesting…, so where do I fit in?
Surprise surprise
Having had an online published presence for almost 20 years now it should not come as a surprise to me that every now and then I stumble across myself in the unlikeliest of places for the unlikeliest of reasons. That said, by now, based from the bits and pieces I have seen here and there, I really should no longer be so surprised that my idea of how to differ robustness from flexibility from agility from resilience resonates with quite a number of people, including Si Alhir, in his blog post on Antifragile, Flexibility, Robust, Resilience, Agility, and Fragile.
The champion of Creative Destruction
Nassim Taleb is certainly no stranger on this blog. After all, in 2009 I did review The Six Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management, an article he co-authored in the Harvard Business Review, and that was based on his book on Black Swans from 2007. And although I read the book, I never reviewed it, but I remember that liked his ideas. His latest book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder” makes creative destruction a major point.
The father of Resilience Theory
CS Holling does not have a blog post here; in hindsight I guess he should have, because he is often recognized as one of the if not THE founding father of resilience theory, and resilience has been one of the more frequent topics on husdal.com, even more so after I turned resilience practitioner after being a resilience researcher. That said, since Holling’s main domain lies within ecology I never thought of his resilience as something that I would be particularly interested in. That is why he is only mentioned as a side note in a blog post on transportation resilience.
The Iconoclast
Gary Hamel is another almost unknown on this blog. He shouldn’t be, because bGary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. In my small world he is mentioned in a comment on my blog post about the HBR guide to Managing External Risk, and I also mentioned him in my review of Lisa Välikangas book on The Resilient Organization, as her co-author in the article on The Quest for Resilience.
The Fantastic Four
So, in his blog post on Antifragile, Flexibility, Robust, Resilience, Agility, and Fragile Si Alhir features me and my definitions alongside those of Taleb, Hamel and Holling, and I must say that I do feel somewhat like being part of the Fantastic Four (pun intended):
However, the most interesting part of Si Alhirs blog post is not the side by side comparison, but a figure that integrates these concepts into one, and that shows how Taleb’s Fragility and Antifragility is a continuum that encloses or surrounds the other concepts.
I like this figure. In a previous blog post I explored Terje Aven’s definitions of vulnerability and resilience, and the notion that you can be generally resilient, but not generally vulnerable, only specifically vulnerable to the specific impact of a specific event relating to a specific risk. That notion now makes much more sense to me when I see fragility below vulnerability. This makes it clear that fragile is a general trait, while vulnerable is a specific trait.
A new way forward?
Taleb’s idea of antifragility is very intruiging, especially if seen the way that Si Alhir manages to put it into one figure that makes it all easy to understand and apply. That reminds me of a paper I wrote 10 years ago, in the early stages of what unfortunately did not manifest into a PhD. Anyway, in that paper – being a qualitative not a qualitative researcher – I took a liking of Giordano Bruno, the 16th century Italian philosopher. Bruno advocated the use of conceptualising, that is to think in terms of images, and he said that to think was to speculate with images. For people to understand science, according to Bruno, it ought to be rich in images and concepts, but poor in formulas.
I think that is exactly what Taleb is trying to do, and I look forward to reading his book on Antifragility, and to see how his ideas fit my own ideas. Si Alhir seems to think they do. I consider that a compliment.
Capability is an important measure in addressing vulnerabilities and in assessing resilience. Is there a way to quantitatively describe what capability entails? That is what Hanna Lindom, Henrik Tehler, Kerstin Eriksson and Terje Aven try to do, in a paper called The capability concept – On how to define and describe capability in relation to risk, vulnerability and resilience. And as the name implies, it’s not just about capability.
Background checks are worth doing
I came across this paper while doing some “background checks” – as I like to call it – on the paper I reviewed the other day. By background check I mean reading the references and/or other papers that could shed some same or different light on the issues in the paper in review. And because in that paper capability was highlighted as an important issue in supply chain risk management I began investigating the concept of capability and found this paper here. A very interesting paper, and definitely an Aven-ish paper, even though he only appears as the fourth author.
Definitions of capability
The concept of capability is used frequently in scientific literature. However, despite the fact that researchers
and practitioners frequently use the concept of capability, they rarely seem to define it. So say the authors. Nonetheless, in their extensive literature review they manage to find no less than 13 different definitions or descriptions of capability:
Looking more closely at these definitions, the authors put forward five trends: that capability equates to resources, that resources are an important part of capability, that capability is related to ability, that capability is related to capacity, and that capability is something that affects a goal.
Capability explained
Building on Aven’s definitions of risk, vulnerability and resilience the authors describe capability in a very same manner, and this is where the paper really is the most Aven-ish:
Capability is the uncertainty about and severity of the consequences of the activity given the occurrence of an initiating event and the performed task.
Capability = (CT U | A T)
This is definitely not an easy definition to follow if you haven’t read Aven’s other definitions first, so let me recapitulate those.
Risk is the uncertainty about and severity of the consequences of an activity.
This relates risk to the familiar definition of risk as a combination of probability and impact, where probability is not seen seen as a deterministic value but as a value that is uncertain and must be taken into account as such.
Vulnerability is the uncertainty about and severity of the consequences of the activity given the occurrence of an initiating event A.
This links vulnerability to risk, saying that a given vulnerability depends on a given risk, but only manifests itself when triggered by an event, meaning that one cannot be generally vulnerable, but only vis-a-vis a certain risk and only triggered by a certain event related to that certain risk.
Resilience is the uncertainty about and severity of the consequences of the activity given the occurence of any type of A.
This links resilience to vulnerability, saying that resilience constitutes the sum of vulnerabilities (or perhaps non-vulnerabilities) in relation to whatever trigger. While one cannot be generally vulnerable, one can be generally resilient.
Going back to the definition of capability can thus be interpreted as the uncertain effect a certain task has that is performed in relation to a vulnerability. There is no general capability, only a certain capability in relation to a certain vulnerability, depending on how a certain task addresses this vulnerability.
Capability explored
Going back to the paper, the authors develop an excellent case example of how capability can be understood the way they have defined it.
In the case example they take the reader through a set of various scenarios where they develop a stepwise determination of capability given the success or failure of the previous step, thus demonstrating that capability is inextricably linked to a task with an uncertain outcome (success or failure).
Conclusion
I started out by saying that this is a very Aven-ish paper, and it is. What is so Aven-ish are the abstract definitions that twist your mind and must be thought through and dissected word by word, and put back together again. I must admit that I in the beginning of my blogging career and academic endeavours stayed away from Aven’s papers because they were hard to grasp and intellectually challenging for a qualitative researcher like me. That said, maybe I have matured or maybe Aven has become more pragmatic over the years (albeit I doubt he has), because his papers have gotten easier to read and understand since I first started to read them. As to the topic of capability I now know a lot more about it.
Reference
Lindbom, H., Tehler, H. , Eriksson, K. , Aven, T. (2015) The capability concept – On how to define and describe capability in relation to risk, vulnerability and resilience. Reliability Engineering & System Safety (135), 45-54. DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2014.11.007
Maritime transport is a vital backbone of today’s global and complex supply chains. Unfortunately, the specific vulnerability of maritime supply chains has not been widely researched. This paper by Øyvind Berle, Bjørn Egil Asbjørnslett and James B Rice puts it right and presents a Formal Vulnerability Assessment of a maritime transportation system. This is not the first maritime paper that Asbjørnslett has contributed to on this blog, and he keeps up the good work he started in 2007, when he presented Coping with risk in maritime logistics at ESREL 2007.
Maritime transport – a forgotten part of supply chains?
I guess it is true that maritime transport or sea transport is an overlooked part of supply chains, even on this blog. In my more than 500 posts the word “maritime only occurs in 20 of them. Well, perhaps not so forgotten, but maybe such an obvious part of today’s supply chains that it is not looked at specifically, and just assumed to be part of the wider picture. Considering Norway’s maritime and seafaring tradition, it is not surprising to see Norwegian researchers taking up this particular question. One of the authors, Asbjørnslett, is part of the Marine System Design research group at the Department of Marine Technology at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, where he among other topics is involved in research related to risk taxonomies in maritime transport systems, risk assessment in fleet scheduling, and studies of vessel accident data for improved maritime risk assessment.
The invisble risk?
It is interesting to see what starting point the authors use in their introduction, namely the 2008 Global Risk Report by the World Economic Forum. In my post on Supply Chain Vulnerability – the invisible global risk I highlighted that report, which listed the hyper-optimization of supply chains as one of four emerging threats at that time, and as the authors put it:
[…] risks in long and complex supply chains are obscured by the sheer degree of coupling and interaction between sources, stakeholders and processes within and outside of the system; disruptions are inevitable, management and preparation are therefore difficult […]
Akin to the infamous “Butterfly effect”, even a minor local disruption in my supply chain could have major and global implications not just on the company directly linked to the supply chain, i.e. me, but also on other businesses. Or conversely, some other company’s disruption may affect me severely, even though I in no (business) way am connected to said company.
Issues and questions
With that in mind the authors set out to address these particular issues they found in their preliminary observations:
I1—respondents have an operational focus; in this, they spend their efforts on frequent minor disruptions rather than the larger accidental events.
I2—stakeholders do know that larger events do happen, and they know that these are very costly, yet they do not prepare systematically to restore the system.
I3—maritime transportation stakeholders find their systems unique. As a consequence, they consider that little may be learnt from benchmarking other maritime transportation system’s efforts in improving vulnerability reduction efforts.
I4—there seems to be little visibility throughout the maritime transportation system.
which led them to to propose these research questions:
RQ1—what would be a suitable framework for addressing maritime transportation system vulnerability to disruption risks?
RQ2—which tools and methods are needed for increasing the ability of operators and dependents of maritime transportation to understand disruption risks, to withstand such risk, and to prepare to restore the functionality of the transportation system after a disruption has occurred?
I like this introduction, clearly identifying a direction and purpose of the paper.
FSA – Formal Safety Assessmement
In order to solve the research questions the authors transfer the safety-oriented Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) framework into the domain of maritime supply chain vulnerability, and call it Formal Vulnerability Assessment (FVA) methodology. FSA – for those of you who don’t know, including me – is a structured and systematic methodology, aimed at enhancing maritime safety, including protection of life, health, the marine environment and property, by using risk analysis and cost benefit assessment:
What might go wrong?
= identification of hazards (a list of all relevant accident scenarios with potential causes and outcomes) How bad and how likely?
= assessment of risks (evaluation of risk factors); Can matters be improved?
= risk control options (devising regulatory measures to control and reduce the identified risks) What would it cost and how much better would it be?
= cost benefit assessment (determining cost effectiveness of each risk control option); What actions should be taken?
= recommendations for decision-making (information about the hazards, their associated risks and the cost effectiveness of alternative risk control options is provided).
While not fully the same, this assessment follows in essence the ISO 31000 risk management steps of risk identification, risk analysis, risk evaluation and risk treatment, a framework that I am very familiar with.
Deconstructing the maritime transport network
What I like in particular is how they deconstructed the maritime transport network, divided the land from the sea and looked at how a vessel interacts with a port that in turn interacts with other modes of transport:
It’s a figure that reminds of my last project I took part in during the autumn of 2011 while still in academia, where we investigated Customer and Agent Initiated Intermodal Transport Chains, and looked at barriers and incentives to competition and collaboration in intermodal transport. I’m not sure the figure would have helped if I had known about it, but it would have made a few things a bit clearer. Kudos to Berle et al. for coming up with it.
Kaplan and Garrick
It is rare to find papers like this that use Kaplan and Garrick’s definition of risk:
Risk may be defined as a triplet of scenario, frequency and consequence of events that may contribute negatively (in this case to the transportation system’s ability to perform its mission. A hazard is a source of potential damage; Kaplan and Garrick describe risk as hazards divided by safeguards. In this, risks cannot be completely removed, only reduced.
I do like this definition of risk, because risk can be seen as incompletely described unless all three elements are in place. An untrained individual or business entity often stops short after the first, or maybe the second question, without fully considering the third. In risk management, addressing the impacts is an important issue, which is why the consequences need to be considered along with the likelihood and source of risk. In this paper, developing a method for assessing the vulnerability i.e. consequences, and deconstructing the maritime transport network, i.e. scenario, this definition of risk makes a lot more sense than any other definition of risk.
Failure modes
Another interesting idea in the paper is the concept of failure modes, taken from the book System Reliability Theory: Models, Statistical Methods, and Applications, written by two Norwegian professors (from NTNU, again, no surprise). Failure modes are used to investigate and understand how the maritime transport system is able to handle unexpected hazards and threats and low-frequency high impact scenarios:
Failure modes are defined as the key functions and capabilities of the supply chain, loss of any such would reduce or remove the ability of the system to perform its mission.
The concept of “mission” is important here, because it emphasizes what vulnerability in a systems perspective is, namely the inability to function and deliver (whatever the system is supposed to deliver):
The critical ways a transportation system may fail can be summed up as the loss of capacity to supply, financial flows, transportation, communication, internal operations/capacity and human resources, which may be described as follows: supply capacity is the ability necessary to source provisions needed for the element to perform its function; for a factory, this is inbound materials, utilities and electricity. Financial flows cover the ability to access capital and liquidity/cash flow. Transportation is the ability to move materials, including those presently at work. Communication would include enabling technology, and is vital for transparency in the supply chain. Internal operations entail the organization’s processing capacity (e.g. converting materials into a good). Quality issues reducing outputs fall into internal operations. Loss of human resources singles out the human factor explicitly from internal operations—what are the personnel needs for the supply chain functions?
The concept of failure modes is an idea the authors developed in a previous paper, Failure modes in ports – a functional approach to throughput vulnerability, a paper which I will review as soon as I get a copy of it. I think the failure modes concept captures the idea of what could go wrong in the maritime supply chain, as seen from a systems perspective:
Hazards and Mission
This is where it gets interesting. In order to transfers the FSA into a FVA, the FVA hazard focus is shifted towards the FVA mission focus. For example, the question of what can go wrong is turned into the question of which functions/capabilities should be protected (to ensure the functionality of the maritime transport system). The same is done for the other questions. Where the FSA looks at measures to mitigate most important risks the FVA looks at measures to restore functions/capabilities. This kind of parallel or similar thinking shows how easy it may be to transfer a concept from one domain into another domain.
Case example – LNG
The FVA is put to test in practice, using LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) shipping as their case. At first I thought there must be better examples, but the issue is that
[…] this analysis is relevant to study energy import dependencies, as current LNG supply chains are optimized to the level that much of the system storage and flexibility can be found in the shipping element, lacking on-shore infrastructure […]
and therefore, definitely a case worth studying.
Conclusion
Not only do the authors develop a conceptual framework for assessing the vulnerability of maritime transport networks, the successfully transfer the maritime Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) framework into the domain of maritime supply chain vulnerability and demonstrate that the approach works. It is not done according to IMO’s own standard, the FSA, thus extending vessel safety to port safety and supply chain safety. I think that this will help this approach gaining acceptance within the wider maritime community. The paper is well-written and well-structured, but I could have wished for a bit more about the FSA. Never having heard about it I had to do some research to find what this was all about. All in all, the paper is a showcase example of how easy it can be to transfer concepts from one domain to another domain, exemplifying a cross-fertilization of research strands.
Reference
Berle, Ø., Asbjørnslett, B.E. and Rice, J.B. (2011) Formal Vulnerability Assessment of a maritime transportation system. Reliability Engineering and System Safety (96) 6, 696–705 DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2010.12.011
I’ve been away from academia for the last three years, and in my efforts to catch up with the latest research in transport-related vulnerability and resilience I decided to start with the most recent papers, and track my way backwards using the references cited as a potential guideline. This paper by Lars-Göran Mattsson and Erik Jenelius on Vulnerability and resilience of transport systems – A discussion of recent research seemed like a good start. What first struck me with this paper not the extesive reference list, but a figure the authors used.
Not the first time
The reason why the figure struck me is that from time to time there are similar figures that appear in a number of different papers, and as a researcher I am always intrigued to find the original source and who came up with this figure in the first place. I first saw this figure it in 2007 when I reviewed Youssi Sheffi’s book The Resilient Enterprise. There they describe what they call a “disruption profile”, which looks something like this:
Sheffi 2004
Going back in time 20 years, a very similar figure was used in Rausand and Einarssons paper from 1997 on An Approach to Vulnerability Analysis of Complex Industrial Systems, showing how an accidental event produces a consequence scenario, a disruption that tests the systems survivability:
Einarsson and Rausand 1997
Similarly, Mattson and Jenelius use a figure they call “Effects of decision-making on resilience”, which relates to same subject, but has a different approach:
Mattsson and Jenelius 2015
Obviously all figures address the same issue, that is the effect of disruptive events on system function (Mattson an Jenelius) or supply chain performance (Sheffi). The difference is that while Sheffi integrates mitigation and adaption in the shape of his one curve, Mattson and Jenelius specifically show how much mitigation and adaption contribute to changing how the curve bends.
So, while the principle behind the figure may not be original, the way that Mattson and Jenelius put it to use in their paper is definitely ground-breaking, because it clearly shows how mitigation can lessen the impact of an event and how resilience can be an expression of how the organisation returns to normal after an event.
Mitigation and adaptation
Now, mitigation and adaptation are two very intriguing concepts here. Essentially, risk management is all about mitigation, whereas adaptation lays the groundwork for resilience. In my world, where risk management is very much based on the bow-tie principle, mitigation is primarily concerned with the left side of the bow-tie, reducing the likelihood of events occurring. I called it mitigative actions and contingent actions respectively.
Bow-tie
Mitigation, where I come from, is mostly concerned with prevention. However, as I am now gradually discovering, mitigation addresses the whole bow-tie, both the causes on the left side and the consequences on the right side. Resilience then, looks further to right of the bow-tie, and how the organisation tries to deal with the long-term impacts of an event. That is a new point of view that I hadn’t thought about, or rather, I had thought about it, but I haven’t able to put it into a figure as brilliantly as Mattsson and Jenelius have done in this paper. It appears to me now that the bow tie is only about preparedness, response, and recovery. By adding adaptation to those three we also add resilience.
First a vulnerability analysis, then resilience
The authors go on to discuss the current literature on resilience and settle for Hollnagel’s four cornerstone definition: knowing what to do, what to look for, what to expect, and what has happened. Vulnerability analysis is an important prerequisite for adequate proactive actions.
Mattsson and Jenelius (2015) Resilience
Resilience, so Hollnagel, can be defined as:
the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions
the degree of ability that an object has to withstand the effects of an (unwanted) event and to resume its original condition or function after that event.
Here the negativity of vulnerability (as in susceptibility to fail) is defined in a positive way, by saying that the better the ability to withstand, the lesser the vulnerability. So actually, my definition of vulnerability in a sense is not too far from Hollnagel’s definition of resilience. Another new discovery for me.
Conclusion
This is a very interesting paper that combines a qualitative introduction with a quantitative argumentation when it comes to exemplifying their discourse. The paper also contains a number of promising references related to resilience that I plan to discuss in a later post.
Reference
Mattsson, L-G., Jenelius, E (2015) Vulnerability and resilience of transport systems – A discussion of recent research. Transportation Research Part A 81 (2015) 16–34. DOI:10.1016/j.tra.2015.06.002
A month ago I posted on my first publication, a book chapter on A Conceptual Framework for Risk and Vulnerability in Virtual Enterprise Networks in Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks: Implementing Supply Chain Principles, edited by Stavros Ponis from NTUA in Athens, Greece, and published by IGI Global. A month ago, the book was merely announced on the publisher’s website, now it is fully present. Not only do I have the honor of opening the book by being the first chapter, but – as I just found out – I also have the honor of having the free sample chapter for download…making my thoughts available for criticism for the whole Internet world, not just the inquisitive reader who stumbles upon this book in the university library and decides to read it.
Resilience. That seems to be the buzzword these days. It seems to be making its way not only around the blogosphere, like on Ken Simpson’s blog, but also in the supply chain and logistics literature. In Ensuring supply chain resilience: Development of a conceptual framework, just out in the Journal of Business Logistics, Timothy J Pettit, Joseph Fiksel and Keely L Croxton develop a concept of supply chain resilience based on an extensive literature search and a focus group study. And quite frankly, this is one of the the better and most comprehensive frameworks for understanding resilience that I have seen, drawing on the quintessence of many years of supply chain risk research. Resilience, in essence, is bridging vulnerabilities by honing capabilities.
A new outlet for articles on supply chain vulnerability? Perhaps. And actually, it’s not that new, since the journal has been in existence for some 16 years, but I haven’t come across the Journal of Marketing Channels as a source for papers on supply chain disruption before. That is why I was so surprised to find Sources of Supply Chain Disruptions, Factors That Breed Vulnerability, and Mitigating Strategies by Karen E Stecke and Sanjay Kumar. Here they develop a classification framework for supply chain catastrophes and the appropriate mitigation strategies for the various types of smaller and bigger supply chain disasters that can occur.
What is risk, and what is vulnerability? While connected, they are not the same, and perhaps, often confused? It is important to see the difference, and that is the starting point of Terje Aven’s 2007 article on A unified framework for risk and vulnerability analysis covering both safety and security. Risk is a more general concept, while vulnerability relates to a certain source. In this paper safety and security, normally based on different analysis approaches and using alternative building blocks, are brought together in a unifying risk and vulnerability framework that covers both accidental and malicious events.
Aah…the intricacies of the English language. Not supply (chain) security, but the security of supply, as in the continuity of supply. Do you see the difference? This conference paper comes from three Finnish researchers, working with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and was presented at ESREL 2007, a conference that will spark many posts on this blog. Today’s paper describes how Finland views logistics and supply as important to national security and how the LOGHU project was created to develop a framework for identification and ranking of threats and corresponding countermeasures. While the paper clearly shows that the project is still a work in progress, much wisdom and food for thought can be drawn from it.
This week’s focus are risks in the maritime supply chain and today’s paper sets out a framework for risk, vulnerability and resilience in maritime supply chains. Coping with risk in maritime logistics, by Bjørn Egil Asbjørnslett and Hallvard Gisnaas, is a conference paper, presented at ESREL 2007, the European Safety and Reliability Conference, in Stavanger, Norway, 25-27 June 2007. Asbjørnslett is not a newcomer to this blog; I have previously reviewed some of his works on the vulnerability of production systems. He is also a proponent of supply chain risk and a member of ISCRIM, and it was while trying to find more of his publications that I stumbled upon the 2007 conference paper. The contents were both surprising and unsurprising.
Supply chains are increasingly becoming complex webs and networks and are no longer straightforward chains with just a few links between supplier and customer. Supply chains have indeed become complex systems, and the system thinking that pervades Einarsson and Rausand (1997) An Approach to Vulnerability Analysis of Complex Industrial Systems is perhaps applicable to supply chains? Why? Perhaps because, really, there is little difference between vulnerability in supply chains and vulnerability in complex industrial systems.
Today we are going back in time, to one of the seminal articles in road vulnerability. Katja Berdica‘s 2002 article, An introduction to road vulnerability: what has been done, is done and should be done has laid the groundwork for many researchers, and has cited by not few authors since it was first published. It is a conceptual paper that provides the basis for why road vulnerability needs to be a more important issue than it usually is considered as. It is also the first paper to develop a framework for measuring road vulnerability.
Another book by someone from the ISCRiM group? No, not this time, or perhaps, yes, after all. Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability: Tools and Methods for Supply Chain Decision Makers by Teresa Wu and Jennifer Blackhurst sounds like ISCRiM, but it’s not. If it were, it should have been noted in the ISCRiM Newsletter, but it wasn’t. Nonetheless, several of the ISCRiM members have contributed to the chapters in this book, which is well worth taking a closer look at, particularly if risk modeling and decision-making is your field.
I’m not in the habit of making Friday a day for funny blog posts, but today’s article highlights a very interesting issue: Beer distribution is a sector that will be highly affected by a supply chain disruption…in the UK. You could even say that beer distribution is part of the UK critical infrastructure. At least, that’s the impression I have after reading McKinnon, Alan (2006). Life Without Trucks: The Impact of a Temporary Disruption of Road Freight Transport on a National Economy. Seriously, the article is about so much more. It shows how dependent our Just-In-Time-society has become on road transport, and what sectors that are most dependent on road transport. Transportation disruption should thus be part of any business continuity plan.
Graph Theory. In Supply Chain Management? It’s probably 10 years ago since last time I looked at Graph Theory. That was when I was writing my thesis for my MSc in GIS on Network Analysis in Raster GIS, and while I know that Graph Theory has many applications, I never expected to see it in Supply Chain Management. Now, Stephan M. Wagner and Nikrouz Neshat are using it in their 2009 paper Assessing the vulnerability of supply chains using graph theory. That is a novel approach, but does it work?
Göran Svensson is one of the leading key figures in supply chain vulnerability research and his concepts and models of supply chain vulnerability are usually well thought-out and easy to understand. So is Key areas, causes and contingency planning of corporate vulnerability in supply chains: A qualitative approach. Here Svensson builds the construct of supply chain vulnerability around three components: time dependence, functional dependence and relational dependence.
It is not unusual for suppliers in a supply chain to come together and act as a Virtual Enterprise Network (VEN) and today’s supply chains exhibit many VEN-like features. Is managing risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks different from managing risks in supply chains? With this in mind I submitted a paper to MITIP2009, the 11th International Conference on the Modern Information Technology in the Innovation Processes of the Industrial Enterprises, to be held in Bergamo, Italy, in October.
Should we actually bother to spend time and money on disaster mitigation, or should we rather focus on preparing for disaster recovery? Is re-active better than pro-active? The BBC World News has an interesting program called the world debate, that puts the important questions to those in the spotlight, and usually this is not the most exciting program. It’s a panel discussion, where representatives from global politics, finance, business, the arts, media and other areas come together and discuss various matters. More often than not, for the few and selected, but not for the many, and not for me. This morning, however, the topics was disasters and risks, and instead of switching off, as I usually do, I kept watching, and I was taken aback by the diversity of the arguments.
How many ways are there for defining vulnerability and criticality, really? Traditionally, risk matrixes have a likelihood/impact approach, but not always. Yesterday, I was examining a criticality/vulnerability matrix. Today, I will take a closer look at a criticality/preparedness matrix with a third susceptibility dimension added to it, as presented in the New Zealand research project Resilent Organisations, a project that has given me plenty of food for thought for my own research in assessing and analyzing resilience.
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