Blog Archives

Crisis? What crisis?

An “ordinary” contingency is not a crisis. An extraordinary contingency is a potential crisis. It is only when the ordinary contingency plans fail or when the ordinary contingency measures are not enough that we have potential crisis at our hands.

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Another volcanic ash cloud crisis?

Air travel disruption after the volcano eruption in Iceland – Consequences for Norwegian travellers and businesses in Norway is a report published by the Institute of Transport Economics and investigates what travellers and businesses did during the volcanic ash cloud crisis in 2010.

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A crisis is NOT an opportunity

Many will probably have heard that When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity. That is not true.

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A typology of crises

What defines a crisis? Are there different types of crises? In this article, crises are classified according to how predictable and influenceable they are. This generates four types of crises: Conventional, Unexpected, Intractable and Fundamental crisis.

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Seconds From Disaster

Crises build up from an accumulation of day-to-day imperfections that are small and unnoticeable (almost) and which progressively make the organization more vulnerable to any potential threats. The Devil lies in the details of these small anomalies (hence the title) and not in the sudden onset of exceptional events.

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Using social media in a crisis

Scandinavian Airlines launched its Facebook page the day before the volcanic ash cloud. Perfect! SAS goes a long way to show how to use social media in a crisis. Perhaps it doesn’t help that much but shows that they care.

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Book Review: Heads in the sand

What is business continuity really? It is the social responsibility to survive that your business has vis-a-vis the community it is located in, the customers it serves and the suppliers that rely on it.

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Pyramidal thoughts

If you are a supply chain or logistics academic or researcher, looking for a new research strand or looking for a new theoretical approach to preparedness and recovery, then yes, this is it.

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Managing supply chains in times of crisis

How do you prepare a supply chain for a crisis, and how do you manage a supply chain when the unexpected hits you?

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Happy Holidelays!

We rarely see news flashes of truck drivers stuck in snow, or perishable goods that has to be scrapped. That is not news that sells. What does sell are passengers and people, but should they really count so much?

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Book Review: HBR on Crisis Management

The closure of SAAB is a major crisis by all standards, and is a fitting reminder that this 10-year old book will never go put of date. Why and how do some companies survive, and some not? This book sheds some light on this. Close calls and near misses are not unusual in the business world, but how do companies deal with them?

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ARTICLES and PAPERS
Graph Theory to the rescue
Graph Theory. In Supply Chain Management? It's probably 10 years ago since last time I looked at Gra[...]
Robustness, resilience, flexibility and agility
robustness flexibility resilience
Several “buzzwords” have been linked to supply chain risk  management (SCRM) in various ways: robust[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book Review: Ethical Risk
This is - for the time being - the sixth and final review of the books in the Gower Short Guides to [...]
Book Review: Strategies and Tactics in Supply Chain Event Management
Operations Management and Logistics have been around for a while, but Supply Chain Management is a r[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
Global Risks 2009 - Countries at risk?
How will the current financial downturn affect supply chains? That's what we all wonder about, isn't[...]
Supply Chain and Transport Risk
We are living in a new world of risk that is making this world unprecedentedly complex and challengi[...]
from HERE and THERE
Sparse transportation networks and disruptions
The vulnerability of the transportation network as part of the supply chain is of particular interes[...]
Is Your Supply Chain Vulnerable?
Recently I came across a report on Supply Chain Vulnerability published as early as 2002 by the Cran[...]