2010/04/03 
from the LITERATURE 
A supply chain is never stronger than its weakest link, and that (having a weak link) is perhaps the greatest supply chain risk. Rigid supply chains are particularly weak, unlike flexible supply chains that can bend and adapt to new situations. Flexible supply chains can indeed “flex” their supply chain management muscles (pun intended) and show the strength that lies in them. With transportation being a key ingredient in any supply chain, much of this strength comes from flexibility in transportation, that is flexibility in node, in link and in time, as Mohamed M. Naim, Andrew T. Potter, Robert J. Mason and Nicola Bateman write in their 2006 article on the role of transport flexibility in logistics provision. Adding flexibility reduces supply chain uncertainty and takes away many supply chain risks.
|
||||
|
All posts in
|
 husdal.com is a gateway to literature reviews of journal articles, research papers, books, websites and other resources in Supply Chain Risk, Business Continuity, and Transport Vulnerability, personally collected and reviewed by Jan Husdal.
 |
||
|
husdal.com © 1999-2010 | About | Contact | Copyright | Privacy | Disclosure | Comments? | Advertise? | Linkback? 
|
||||
A missed classic? Perhaps, because after reading this article I realized that this in many ways is a seminal paper. Rachel Mason-Jones and Dennis Towill are not unknown to me, and I’ve come across their names time and again, but this is probably the first time I delved more deeply into their research and their journal articles. Their 1998 paper Shrinking the Uncertainty Circle is one of the articles – if not the article – that paved the way for many frameworks for risks in supply chains, most notably the supply-demand-process-control model found among Martin Christopher and his followers.
What a difference a title makes. I only found this article because it was referenced in another article. Why? Because it never occurred to me to search for articles on “risk” using “uncertainty” as a keyword. Bummer. Risk is undeniably linked to uncertainty, but I have never made that mental connection and never searched for articles on “supply chain risk” using the term “supply chain uncertainty”. Perhaps I should have, because Establishing a transport operation focused uncertainty model for the supply chain illustrates very well how transportation is a staple ingredient in supply chains and how uncertainty is a staple ingredient in risk assessments, and consequently, transportation uncertainty is a staple ingredient in supply chain risks.
No, it’s not what you think it is, but I could not think of a more fitting title (to attract more readers), and had I been the author of this article, that’s the title I probably would have used when submitting my article, although I’m not sure the editor of the Journal of Supply Chain Management would have approved of it. More academically correctly titled, Triads in supply networks: Theorizing buyer-supplier-relationships by Thomas Y Choi and Zhaohui Wu is a fascinating read and a brilliant attempt at classifying buyer-supplier triads into nine distinctively different configurations.
Humanitarian operations rely heavily on logistics in uncertain, risky, and urgent contexts, making them a very different field of application for supply chain management principles than that of traditional businesses. Decentralization, pre-positioning and pooling of relief items are key success factors for dramatic improvements in humanitarian operations performance in disaster response and recovery. So say Aline Gatignon, Luk N van Wassenhove and Aurelie Charles in their newest article, The Yogyakarta earthquake: Humanitarian relief through IFRC’s decentralized supply chain. I believe they are right.
2010/07/11 : WCTR 2010
2010/07/01 : Mitigating Supply Chain Vulnerability
2010/06/23 : Humanitarian Relief Supply Chains
2010/06/19 : The causes of logistics uncertainty
2010/06/14 : How Norwegian freight carriers handle supply chain disruptions
2010/06/11 : State of the art in SCRM?
2010/05/03 : Risk and Vulnerability in Virtual Enterprise Networks
2010/04/30 : What goes into resilience?
2010/04/29 : Pay more get more?
2010/04/24 : Volcanic ash cloud – really a surprise?