A wide scope

No one would argue that essential services like electricity and the Internet are not vital to organizational success today. Logistics and Supply functions are equally essential. Without these, an organization receives no inbound goods and cannot distribute its products. Anything that threatens these vital activities threatens a firm’s very existence. Supply chain risk management therefore provides fertile ground for academic investigation, says the call. The scope of this issue is thus quite extensive and  suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:

• The nature of supply chain risk management and emerging trends in the study and practice in this rapidly-developing field.
• Advances in the assessment and management of supply chain risk.
• The role of total cost analysis (design versus disruption) in effective supply chain risk strategies.
• Behavioral decision making as an enabler or impediment of effective risk management.
• Risk sharing in multi-firm risk management strategies.
• The role of supply chain risk management in global competitiveness (e.g., how effective supply chain risk management supports competitiveness-enhancing global trade patterns).
• Supply chain risk management in the face of interacting product design and logistics issues.
• Supply cost and performance risk as a result of deteriorating freight transportation infrastructure.
• Securing global supply networks.
• The nature and management of supply risk associated with freight capacity limitations.
• The logistical impact of rapid demand fluctuations and approaches to managing the associated supply risk.
• Assessing and effectively managing supply chain costs associated with logistics price volatility.
• Modeling the economic value of effective supply chain risk management.
• The extent to which supply chain risk and its management varies or is consistent among nations.

ISCRiM

The two guest editors behind this call are not unknown to me: Michael E Smith and Lee Buddress. While I have never met Lee Buddress, I know Michael E Smith from last year’s ISCRiM 2010 meeting. Regular readers of this blog will also remember that I reviewed Smith and Buddress’ article on SCM: Borrowing our way to a new discipline, where I described supply chain management as a new research cocktail. Considering the wide scope of the call, the term “research cocktail” reverberates throughout it, and I am not surprised to see Smith and Buddress as guest editors, and although we ISCRiM members were among the first to receive news of this call, I do hope that this will not turn out to be an ISCRiM only special issue of the JBL.

Submission deadline

Don’t forget to submit your article before 31 December 2011.

Download

• Read the call in full: Global Supply Chain Risk

Publisher link

• wiley.com: Journal of Business Logistics

Related posts

• husdal.com: Global Supply Chain Risk Management

Disciplines don’t just happen, they are made

With the advent of today’s globalized and interconnected 24/7 business, and with supply chains stretched around the globe, endlessly pumping raw materials, finished goods, information and money from one end of the world to the other, supply chain management has emerged as an important discipline in business-related curricula. In the past, emerging disciplines have appeared when there were significant shifts in paradigm, enabling new perspectives to take the center stage. Such are paradigm shift is now needed in supply chain management.

Borrowing is a good thing

When I first saw the title tagline ‘Borrowing our way to a new discipline’, I thought the authors were ridiculing supply chain management for not having own thoughts, but stealing from other disciplines, and  creating a separate discipline by simply pouring old wine in new bottles. But that is not what the authors mean.  Although supply chain management may seem to lack a clear foundation in the Kuhnian sense, where for supply chain management to clearly exhibit disciplinary thinking, research should be

firmly based upon past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges  for some time as supplying the foundation for its further practice

that does mean that supply chain management is not an emerging discipline. Quite contrary, it clearly exhibits the hallmarks of an emerging discipline. But, in order to evolve further, and to root itself, supply chain management can and should embrace other fields, and not just the obviously related subjects.

Not a sum of smaller parts

Supply chain management uses a systems approach in much of its thinking, and as such, departs from the hard scientific disciplines, where the focus is no longer an analytical concentration on the parts, but a wider perspective on the whole:

A view of the supply chain from this perspective recognises that that we are not looking at a chain of entities but a web of relationships, and this view focuses not on optimising small portions of the web and assuming that the sum of optimised parts will represent the optimal whole. Instead, this perspective focuses on patterns that connect processes by which the web accomplishes the creation of value.

The creation of value seems to be a driving force in this article, but indeed, it is a driving force in supply chains.

Supply Chain Management is a verb, not a noun

So, supply chain management should be looking at expansive ways in which a greater interorganizational whole can be created and facilitated to creat enhanced customer value. This can only be done by adopting a liberal view of what comprises the new discipline:

This suggests moving away from viewing supply chain management as a ‘thing’, which serves immediately to restrict attention to those elements that have been defined into the term. Instead, we propose that supply chain management should be viewed as a verb. We can take this perspective if we view supply chain management as the orchestration of boundary-spanning intra-and interorganisational relationships withe the intention of enhancing the creation of value.

Strong and bold words.

Sources of knowledge in SCM

I think this figure needs no further explanation.

Creative approaches

Thus, what supply chain management needs, are new approaches and approaches adapted from other disciplines, and Smith and Buddress list some 25 examples of other disciplines and realms with obvious and not so obvious linkages to supply chain flows, some of which are:

• Finance - Option theory
  • What are the strategies for quantifying an mitigating supply chain risk?
• Communications – Language
  • How does languaging and categorization affect supply chain management effectiveness?
• Psychology – Change in social systems
  • How does one promote movement toward and improved supply chain management?
• Biology – Epidemiology
  • How do problems and innovation spread in supply networks?
• Physics – Chaos theory
  • What are the limits of knowledge in supply chain management?
• Physics – Fluid mechanics
  • How do changes in volume of materials affect the challenges of managing those flows?

These are only some of the more interesting sources of knowledge from other disciplines and how they might be applied to supply chain management. This list is indeed wider, more expansive, and more creative than the list presented by James Stock in Applying theories from other disciplines to logistics.

Conclusion

This paper does show a new way to pursue research in supply chain management. Instead of cataloguing best practices  and fact finding (there are an array of case studies in supply chain management research), the focus should be on learned borrowing from other disciplines. It is only this way that it is possible to present thought-provoking paradigms and methods that can be found useful in supply chain management. The limit is the imagination of the researcher.

Giordano Bruno

Speaking of imagination, and being some sort of crossbreed-researcher myself, I am again reminded of Giordano Bruno, which I mentioned in my previous post on Broader research = better research:

Giordano Bruno was a philosopher who took the current ideas of his time and extrapolated them to new and original vistas. He claimed that all matter was intimately linked to all other matter, that we live in a universe in which all things are related. Nothing could be more true of the global supply chains of our days. Giordano Bruno is unique compared to the other martyrs of his time because of the power of his forward-thinking, where others were personal-thinking or contrary-thinking.

It is indeed time for supply chain management to be forward-thinking, and take in other perspectives, and today, 4 years after Supply chain management: borrowing our way to a discipline, I can tell that many new ideas are already in the mold.

Reference

Smith, M., & Buddress, L. (2005). Supply chain management: borrowing our way to a discipline International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 1 (4) DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2005.007495

Links

• wcu.edu: Michael E Smith
• pdx.edu: Leland Buddress

Related

• husdal.com: Broader research = better research?
• husdal.com: What kind of supplychainist are you?