Blog Archives

Posts inspired by academic articles I have read

Inbound and outbound vulnerability

In ‘A conceptual framework of vulnerability in firms’ inbound and outbound logistics flows.’, Göran Svensson separates inbound and outbound flows, adds 2 categories of disturbance (quantitative and qualitative), and also adds 2 sources of disturbance (atomistic and holistic) create 4 vulnerability scenarios.

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A conceptual framework for supply chain vulnerability

Separating the chaff from the wheat and diving straight into the essence of the paper, Svensson aligns his framework along two dimensions, categories of disturbance and sources of disturbance. He then divides the categories into either quantitative or qualitative disturbances. Sources of disturbance are either atomistic (direct) or holistic (indirect).

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Drivers of supply chain vulnerability

In her article Drivers of supply chain vulnerability: an integrated framework, Helen Peck identifies four drivers of supply chain vulnerability:Value stream, product or processes,Assets and infrastructure dependencies,Organizations and inter-organizational networks,The Environment.

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Finding the right location – minimizing disruption costs

Classical facility location models assume that once optimally located and set up, facilities will operate as planned, smoothly, and without interruption. In reality, though, operations seldom go as planned; interruptions, unscheduled downtime and failures occur every once in a while, with unplanned and unbudgeted disruption costs as a consequence.

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From the back room to the board room

Supply chain management used to be relegated to the logistics department of businesses and hardly thought of as matters concerning the top-level management. In his 2004 paper, Joseph L. Cavinato points out five sub-networs within the supply chain that need special attention:Physical – the actual movement of goods, shipping and warehousing
Finance, Information, Relations, Innovation.

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Accessibility Index – Transport Network Vulnerability

The starting point for this paper is the question of how to define and find critical locations in a transport network. A network node is vulnerable if loss or degradation of a small number of links diminishes the accessibility of the node. A network link is critical if loss or degradation of the links diminishes the accessibility of the network or of particular nodes

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How to Design Mitigation Capabilities

The severity of supply chain disruptions stems from supply chain design characteristics and supply chain mitigation capabilities: Supply Chain Design: supply chain density,supply chain complexity, node criticality. Supply Chain Mitigation Capability: recovery capability, warning capability.

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Categorization of Supply Chain Risk

Supply chain risks can include a number of different issues, and the article structures these issues along three dimensions: 1) the Supply Chain itself, 2) Risk Management processes and 3) Types of Risk.

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The difference between legal and illegal supply chains

Daniel Ekwall’s thesis combines theories from criminology with theories from logistics and supply chain management to examine cross-over points or antagonistic gateways between the legal and illegal logistics system from a supply chain perspective.

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An empirical investigation into supply chain vulnerability

Drivers of supply chain vulnerability are 1) supply-side risk 2) demand-side risk, 3) catastrophic risk. Sources of risk are a) customer dependence and b) supplier dependence, d) supplier concentration and d) single sourcing and e) global sourcing.

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Managing risk in global supply chains

The book Strategies for Building Successful Global Businesses, by the INSEAD-Wharton Alliance on Globalizing, contains 6 articles on managing risk and uncertainty. Today I will look at one of these articles that deserves further mentioning.

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Building a secure and resilient supply chain

Are you gambling with your supply network? You should be aware that the supply network is inherently vulnerable to disruption and the failure of any one element in it could cause the whole network to fail. Actions to improve security can be classified into three categories: Physical security, Information security, Freight security. Actions to improve resilience can be be divided into: Flexibility, Redundancy.

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Supply Chain Risk Management: A Neural Network Approach

Supply chain event management (abbreviated as SCEM) is a consideration of all possible occurring events and factors that can cause a disruption in a supply chain.

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Corridor Analysis – A timeline of evolutionary development

corridor-modellingLocating a right-of-way for a linear facility such as a pipeline, a transmission line, a railway or a roadway can be a complex problem. Locating a corridor connecting an origin and a destination on a landscape is analogous to identifying a route that traverses a continuous landscape. Thus, corridor analysis is closely linked to shortest-path finding and network analysis in raster GIS, and has evolved along with it. Corridor analysis is essentially a variant of surface analysis, but can also be viewed as a site selection problem where an optimal contiguous and elongated site is sought.

My PhD?

On a sidenote, I should mention that since this post was first published,

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ARTICLES and PAPERS
What's so special about this Paul Kleindorfer?
Apparently there must be something really special about Paul Kleindorfer. Otherwise there would be n[...]
Graph Theory to the rescue
Graph Theory. In Supply Chain Management? It's probably 10 years ago since last time I looked at Gra[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Risk Management in Global Supply Chain Networks
Supply Chain Risks can be classified as either one of these three, Deviation, Disruption or Disaster[...]
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[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
A risky business? The top 10 challenges of offshoring
Organisations embarking on offshoring face multiple challenges; many of which can be extremely daunt[...]
Global Resilience Index
The 2015 FM Global Resilience Index provides an annual ranking of 130 countries and territories acco[...]
from HERE and THERE
Supply chains and barcodes
Have you ever thought about how barcodes are a major factor in performance of supply chains? As we a[...]
Christchurch earthquake and transportation
Christchurch, New Zealand, has been hit by an earthquake. Having spent some time living there myself[...]