There are many definitions of agility. A supply chain can be defined as agile, when it is flexible and responds quickly to customer needs. Agility can also be seen as a measure to mitigate supply chain risks, building on this thought Dani and Ranganathan (2008) developed a model to mitigate risks using the concept of agility .
Today’s article is from the late 90s, but sets a great example for research methodology in supply chain risk management. But don’t worry, I will focus on the results, since they’re very interesting as well. The objective of today’s article (Supply Chain Management in Food Chains: Improving Performance by Reducing Uncertainty) is to show strategies (here called principles) to reduce uncertainty, and at the same time show the beneficial effects of reduced uncertainty.
A supply chain usually does not stand alone. Frequently a supply chain is defined by the need of the end customer which has to be satisfied. Since one company commonly deliver several products, within a single company there can be multiple different supply chains aggregated under one organization. This task of managing multiple supply chains is most often referred to as Supply Chain Portfolio Management. It is still in a very early stage of research, so there are only few researchers focusing on this part.
This week I would like to think about the future of supply chain management. Cox and Lamming wrote a corresponding article titled: “Managing supply in the firm of the future”.
This article presents a comprehensive practice oriented framework for managing supply chain disruptions by Sunil Chopra and ManMohan S. Sodhi. The article has been published in the MIT Sloan Management Review in 2004. The framework covers everything from risk analysis to the selection of the risk mitigation strategy.
The article on review today serves two distinct needs, by summarizing the current (2012) state of supply chain risk management.
The title of the article implies, that this is only a summary relevant for researchers. But this is not the case: of course there is also a short summary of current research and supply chain risk management, but a major part consists of two focus groups with practitioners and researchers, to define the current gaps in supply chain risk management.
Supply chain mapping can be a great tool to foster the understanding and from its results improve a supply chain network overall. Supply chain mapping can also be used to analyze the risks of a supply chain and improve its resilience (for an example in the blog follow this link).
In last weeks article (Hendricks and Singhal, 2005) I described the effects of supply chain glitches on supply chain performance. This week should be viewed an update to that.
