Blog Archives

Highway Vulnerability and Criticality Assessment

It is important to distinguish to between criticality and vulnerability when assessing the importance of the road and highway network. Collectively, these factors are an indication of the conditions, concerns, consequences, and capabilities that might cause an operating agency to label an asset “critical.”

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Book Review: Managing Risk and Resilience in the Supply Chain

This book is clear and concise, to the point, and constantly switching between risk management in general, supply chain risk, and business continuity, always seeing the whole picture

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Transportation reliability and vulnerability

This is a philosophical essay on transportation vulnerability, where three fields or subjects are brought together : engineering (reliability and vulnerability), economics (cost and benefits) and politics (decision making).The research essay aims at taking reliability and vulnerability into the realm of cost-benefit analysis to serve as decision support.

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Assess the vulnerability of your production system

The paper defines the concept of vulnerability as it applies to production systems and is built around three concepts: A taxonomy of vulnerability factors as a basis for or guideline in establishing scenarios.
An input/output model to describe production systems.
A two-step vulnerability analysis for productions systems.

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Three steps to make your supply chain less vulnerable

To make the supply chain more resilient, businesses need to do more than just think about the problem; they must prepare to act effectively, and find the optimal tradeoff between disruption costs and mitigation costs.

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Book Review: Supply Chain Risk Management

This excellent book by Donald Waters offers a comprehensive overview of many important issues in managing supply chain risk. More than 15 case studies and a straightforward hands-on practical approach make this book an enjoyable read. I almost forgot that I bought this book as a text book.

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Why we need to think the unthinkable

To think the unthinkable, to plan for the unthinkable is maybe not what is most on people’s mind and more often than not, it is only after a crisis that our thinking shifts. Then however, it may be too late.

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The Swedish Road Network – Vulnerable or not?

The increase in generalised travel costs weighted by the satisfied or unsatisfied demand when network links are closed is used as a measure of vulnerability for a case study in Northern Sweden, and applied to the terms of importance and exposure.

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How New Zealand develops resilient organisations

As our infrastructure and organisations become ever more networked and interdependent there is a growing need to focus on managing overall system risk. In particular, there is a need to focus not only on the vulnerability of our systems to failure, but also on our ability to manage and minimise the impact of any failures.

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Is Your Supply Chain Vulnerable?

Supply chain vulnerability is an important business issue, but little research has been undertaken into supply chain vulnerabilities. Recently I came across a report on Supply Chain Vulnerability published as early as 2002 by the Cranfield University.

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How to disrupt a supply chain

A typical supply chain consists of a company with incoming raw materials from an upstream supplier and outgoing products to a downstream customer.
A supply chain is characterized by its locational and organizational design.
There are many potential disruptions to a supply chain.
The potential disruptions may or may not influence locational decisions.
The impact and severity of disruptions depends on both locational vulnerability and organizational adaptability.

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Cost-Benefit Analysis – an essay about valuation problems

Reliability and vulnerability are important elements in ensuring a smooth 24/7 operation of transportation networks, road networks in particular, and cost-benefit analyses of transportation projects should take this into account. One way of doing this is to say that investments in improved reliability constitute a cost and thereby saved disruption costs constitute a benefit.

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The vulnerability of road networks in a cost-benefit perspective

A reliable transportation network represents a net benefit to society, and conversely, a vulnerable network represents a net cost to society. Hence, vulnerability ought to be an important parameter for decision-support in cost-benefit analyses, by seeking to establish a link between the terms reliability and vulnerability vis-à-vis costs and benefits.

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Reliability and vulnerability versus costs and benefits

Looking beyond the science of vulnerability assessments, this paper discusses some of the network attributes that influence the vulnerability of transport networks, influences that can be described as structure-related, nature-related or traffic-related attributes. The paper introduces vulnerability as a parameter for decision-support in cost-benefit analyses.

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Reliability and vulnerability versus costs and benefits

The paper outlines a framework for developing a methodology that to incorporate reliability and vulnerability as parameters for decision-support in a cost-benefit analysis. In doing so, this paper seeks to establish a link between the terms reliability/vulnerability and cost/benefit and seeks to describe reliability and vulnerability in terms of cost and benefit.

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The reliability and vulnerability of transportation lifelines

Transportation networks like freeways and interstate highways are the main backbone of modern society. Consequently, the reliability or vulnerability of any transportation network is thus a decisive factor not only in terms of market outreach and competition, but also in terms of continuity, to ensure a 24/7 operation of the community we live in.

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ARTICLES and PAPERS
Resilience X 10
Transport network resilience has 10 properties. So says Pamela Murray-Tuite in her 2006 article A Co[...]
Strategies for managing risk in multinational corporations
In my post two days ago, reviewing the article by Manuj and Mentzer (2008) titled Global Supply Chai[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book Review:Managing Risks in Supply Chains
To make up for yesterday's perhaps overly harsh critique of just one article from this book, this is[...]
The Handbook of Business Continuity Management
As I said in my post yesterday, Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) has many similarities with Busin[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
Supply Chain and Transport Risk
We are living in a new world of risk that is making this world unprecedentedly complex and challengi[...]
London Olympics and Business Continuity
Are UK businesses, and in particular London businesses, unprepared for the London Olympics in 2012? [...]
from HERE and THERE
What are you afraid of?
What do businesses in Scandinavia fear the most? That is what Nordic insurance giant If Insurance de[...]
Supply chains compete, not companies
"Supply chains compete, not companies" is the motto on Martin Christopher's web site, www.martin-chr[...]