Webinars – a coming trend?

Why blog when you can webinar? And what is a webinar, by the way? According to Wikipedia, a webinar is (typically) a one-way web conference with limited audience interaction, such as in a webcast. Each participant sits at his or her own computer and watches and listens to a speaker on a certain topic. The closest I’ve come to a webinar was Christopher Tang’s YouTube presentation on mitigating supply chain disruptions. YouTube seems very passée now, webinars are the future…and WTG has a whole collection of them, for example:

Supply Chain – It’s risky business

A webinar on supply chain risk by Douglas Kent from the Supply Chain Council examines the responses from hundreds of global companies to our recent supply chain risk survey, unveiling their most concerning risks and the level of exposure.  In addition, the study uncovers how companies are evaluating their level of vulnerability and, most importantly, reveals the best practices being adopted to effectively mitigate supply chain risk.

Supply Chain Resilience

Yossi Sheffi has a webinar on supply chain resilience, where he highlights the most effective ways of developing resilient supply chains and will explored how they can be used for day-to-day competitive advantage. The ability to bounce back from unexpected supply chain disruptions is the essence of “resilience”. Resilience can be achieved by building in redundancy (e.g., in inventories, capacity, and suppliers), but such redundancies are expensive. A more viable way of ensuring resilience is by building in flexibility into the supply chain.

WTG on Demand

The good thing about WTG is that most of their webinars are made available on demand after they have been broadcast, so even if you’ve missed one, you can still watch it later, when you have the time: WTG On Demand.

Link

• wtgwebinar.com: WTG Webinar

Related

• husdal.com: Managing Supply Chain Disruptions on You Tube

husdal.com is an official media partner for WTG Webinars

The Resilient Enterprise

A resilient company will change the way it operates, and  thus increase its competitiveness. But how? In 2005 Yossi Sheffi published the book The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage and this article serves as an executive summary of the highlights in his book. If you don’t have access to the book, this article is an excellent substitute.

The Disruption Profile

At the center stage of the article is the disruption profile. This is tell-tale illustration of what happens when supply chains are disrupted and businesses are impacted. They may, or may not, be able to bounce back to where they were before the event. The survivability of the company depends solely on the company’s resilience towards the disruption. Sheffi sees flexibility and redundancy  as the key ingredients to achieve this resilience. That said, he wasn’t the first to come with this. In a 1997 article, Stefan Einarsson and Marvin Rausand used in in building a framework for vulnerability analysis of complex industrial systems.

Vulnerability Assessment

Sheffi uses the traditional approach towards vulnerability, as a function of probability and consequences. Vulnerability is highest when both the likelihood and the impact of disruption are high. Rare, low-consequence events represent the lowest levels of vulnerability and require little planning or action.

Market position and responsiveness

A company’s resilience is a function of its competitive position and the responsiveness of its supply chain. This responsiveness or switching ability is determined by two parameters, redundancy and flexibility.

Redundancy and Flexibilty

Redundancy is the familiar concept of keeping some resources or safety stock in reserve to be used in case of a disruption. However, there is significantly more leverage in making supply chains flexible than there is in adding redundancy. Flexibility is building organic capabilities that can sense threats and respond to them quickly.

Five Facets of Flexibility

Flexibility needs to pervade the whole supply chain in order to gain full organizational resilience and Sheffi identifies five elements where flexibility can be injected: supply, manufacturing and production (which he calls conversion), distribution, control (and decision) systems and the wider corporate culture.

Gauging the magnitude of a large disruption early requires a mindset that continuously questions prevailing wisdom and a culture that allows “maverick” information to be heard, understood and acted upon.

Conclusion

I am not sure I follow Sheffi’s and Rice’s thoughts to the full, since we appear to have a different view on key terms such as robustness, flexibility and resilience, which I have attempted to clarify in my recent article, that also includes agility, where I try to de-confuse these four terms:

Sheffi sees flexibility as a way to achieve resilience, stating that instead of relying solely on supply chain redundancy, a well-managed firm should develop resilience, by building flexibility that can be used to ‘bounce back’ from disruptions. To me, that would rather be agility than flexibility.

Differences in semantics aside, the important issue, and I agree with Sheffi here,  is that flexibility garners benefits and operational efficiencies also in the normal course of business. In that respect the article makes a brilliant argument for why flexibility should be part of business operations planning.

Reference

Shefi, Y., & Rice, J.B. (2005). A Supply Chain View of the Resilient Enterprise MIT Sloan Management Review, 47 (1), 41-48 sloanreview.mit.edu

Author links

• mit.edu: James B Rice
• mit.edu: Yossi Sheffi

Download

• Read the full article: A Supply Chain View of the Resilient Enterprise (pdf)

Related

• husdal.com: Book Review – The Resilient Enterprise
• husdal.com: Robustness, Resilience, Flexibility and Agility

Not the first?

The curve in this figure is the same as can be seen in the New Zealand project Resilient Organizations , also a project worth taking note of.

Sheffi's Disruption Profile

It is also the same as in Bjørn Egil Asbjørnslett and Marvin Rausand (1997) Assessing the vulnerability of your productions system, or in Stefan Einarsson and Marvin Rausand (1997) An Approach to Vulnerability Analysis of Complex Industrial Systems written 10 years before Sheffi wrote his book.

Links

• www.resorgs.org.nz: Resilient Organisations

Related

• husdal.com: Assessing the vulnerability of your production system
• husdal.com: Book Review – The Resilient Enterprise
• husdal.com: A Supply Chain View of the Resilient Enterprise

Bedtime stories

This is a good story-book, but it’s a story-book with a message. Keep it on your desk at all times, or even better, keep a second copy on your nightstand, and let resilience be the last thought in your mind before falling asleep.

Sheffi’s Disruption profile

There is a figure in ‘the Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage’ by Yossi Sheffi that every supply chain risk manager (or even every CEO for that matter) should take note of: the disruption profile. This is tell-tale illustration of what happens when supply chains are disrupted and businesses are impacted.

Resilient Organisastions

A very similar (i.e. inverted) figure can be seen in Resilent Organisastions, a New Zealand research project designed to assist organisations in recovering their economic competitiveness after hazard events, focussing not only on the vulnerability of our systems to failure, but also on our ability to manage and minimise the impact of any failures.

Vulnerability of production systems

This figure is not new. Already in 1997,  Bjørn Asbjørnslett, a Norwegian researcher from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, used it when he described how to assess the vulnerability of production systems, showing how a resilient system has the ability to adapt in order to regain a new stable position.

Reference

Sheffi, Y. (2005). The Resilient Enterprise – Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Author links

• mit.edu: Yossi Sheffi

Links

• resorgs.org.nz: Resilient Organisations

Related

• husdal.com: Sheffi’s disruption profile
• husdal.com: Resilient Organisations
• husdal.com: Assess the vulnerability of your production system
• husdal.com: A Supply Chain View of the Resilient Enterprise

What is resilience?

One major strategy to overcome such disruptions is to ensure that there is sufficient resilience in the supply chain.

Resilience is a function of situation awareness, management of keystone vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity in a complex, dynamic and interconnected environment. (Resilient Organisations Research Report 2007/01)

And the degree to which you are resilient and ready determines your ability to react to, respond to and recover from any supply chain disruption.

All four elements need to be in place, reducing your key vulnerabilities, being ready to adapt and change your supply chain, responding appropriately to unwanted events and having a clear strategy for how your are going to recover from a major setback is what will set you apart from the rest of the crowd, should “disaster” strike.

Resilient organisations

If you have everything in place, no need to read further, if not, I do recommend you to visit website of the New Zealand research project Resilient Organisations, www.resorgs.org.nz. You can also find useful hints on how to build a resilient supply chain in the article  Building a Resilient Supply Chain by Yossi Sheffi in The Harvard Business Online.

Links

• Harvard Business Online: Building a Resilient Supply Chain
• resorgs.org.nz: Resilient Organisations

Related

• husdal.com: How New Zealand develops Resilient Organisations
• husdal.com: Resilience Revisited
• husdal.com: Humanitarian and Military Supply Chains must work side-by-side