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2010/08/30 from the LITERATURE No reactions yet

Infrastructure Vulnerability

This is a paper that has been collecting dust in my articles archive for quite a while, but it is indeed a paper that shouldn’t be hidden to the readers of my blog and it deserves to be promoted. The reason why I like it is because it adopts a holistic approach to model the interconnectedness and interdependencies of infrastructure systems.  Infrastructure Risk Analysis Model, written by Barry C Ezell, John V Farr and Ian Wiese and published in 2000 describes an infrastructure risk analysis model that in a straightforward engineering manner considers possible threats, potential impacts and their mitigation.

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2010/08/28 from the LITERATURE No reactions yet

Importance and Exposure – Measures of Road Network Vulnerability?

Today I am presenting a paper from an old friend of mine. Well, “friend” is perhaps a slight exaggeration, as I have only met him a few times, but his work has nevertheless been a great inspiration to me over the years, since we work in the same field: transport network vulnerability. In 2006 Erik Jenelius from KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, together with Tom Petersen and Lars Göran Mattson published Importance and exposure in road network vulnerability analysis, where they introduce the concepts of link importance and site exposure. In the paper they calculate several indices for link importance and site exposure for the Swedish road network, based on the increase in generalized travel cost when links are closed.

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2010/08/24 from the LITERATURE 7 reactions

Next time in China: Guanxi

Today’s post is an extension of what I wrote yesterday, in my review of what Fu Jia and Christine Rutherford wrote in Mitigation of supply chain relational risk caused by cultural differences between China and the West, an article that is very much based on Fu Jia’s PhD, Cultural adaptation between Western buyers and Chinese suppliers, where he describes nine important types of cultural differences that Westerners need to be aware of when doing business in China. If you ignore these differences, your business ventures in China, or in much of Asia for that matter, are destined to fail miserably. Today I will present these differences in more detail.

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2010/08/23 from the LITERATURE 9 reactions

Supply Chain Risk: Culture Shock

Is culture shock the reason why so many global and cross-culture business relationships fail? When it comes to Western buyers and Chinese suppliers this may very well be the case, and while issues related to product quality or supplier reliability may seem as the obvious cause externally, cultural differences may be the root cause internally. Fu Jia and Christine Rutherford from Cranfield University have just published an article on Mitigation of supply chain relational risk caused by cultural differences between China and the West, where they claim that the extent of cultural adaptation between supplier and buyer is what makes or brakes global partnerships that are culturally different.

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2010/07/01 from the LITERATURE 3 reactions

Mitigating Supply Chain Vulnerability

I’m a quantitative researcher, so I usually shy away from journal articles with too many equations and complicated calculations. This one, however, I can not avoid mentioning, because it is brilliantly simple, despite its seemingly complicated looks. In their article, aptly titled Mitigating Supply Chain Vulnerability, Brian D Neureuther and George Kenyon develop a risk assessment index that can be used to measure the vulnerability of different supply chain structures. While it is apparently straightforward to calculate this risk index, it is subject to a number of assumptions that are not equally straightforward to quantify. Is it still worth reading and using?

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