Large Cooperations often employ staff for supply chain planning and sometimes additional staff for supply chain risk management.
Small / medium enterprises usually have more limited resources and therefore have to focus more. For this reason M.N. Faisal developed a prioritization of supply chain risks.
Continuing with on with articles on general Systems Design and foundational articles, today I would like to talk about Conway’s seminal paper on “How Do Committees Invent” from 1968. If you want to read the paper completely, you can do so on Conway’s web page.
In his article Conway describes system design at its most generic level. Be it a system to prevent natural disasters or a new product of a company.
Nowadays green logistics is an often heard buzz-word, but already eleven years ago Beamon published an article about the challenges with creating Green Supply Chains.
Traditional vs. Extended Supply Chain
A traditional supply chain has been mostly a one-way street. The issues analyzed were eg. the number of echelons, buyer-supplier relationships and inventory levels.
For many years sustainability risks have been largely neglected. Reputational damages caused by incidents like the Brent Spar platform can reach tens of millions of dollars. But in a supply chain context companies are not only held responsible for their own actions but also for the actions of their suppliers.
In their 2010 paper Foerstl et al. analyze supplier sustainability risk and develop and test a framework for its mitigation.
The article reviewed here takes a look at typical biases in supply chain demand planning and how to avoid it. This work could prove very valuable for many companies who rely on manually adjusted forecasts.
Usually the forecasting process uses two steps:
1) statistical forecast by the forecasting system
2) manual adjustment to include additional effects (eg. additional analysis of demand pattern not included in step 1)
