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)
Submitted by Daniel Dumke on Wed, 2010-12-22 09:50
Paper
How to Get Value Out of Your Returns
Year:
2010
I haven’t written anything about reverse logistics, yet. Mostly because it’s not a focus of in my own research. Nontheless, especially after the holidays returns will be on the mind of many supply chain professionals.
Reverse Logistics
The goal of reverse logistics is to efficiently and effectively handle returned products by establishing infrastructure and processes to accept incoming products and prepare them for resale, reuse, or recycling.
Today I want to have a look at “Design and operation of distribution centres within agile Supply Chains” by Peter Baker (2008; Cranfield University).
The main part of the article describes the results of a survey conducted with nine business units to assess challenges and measures for supply chain agility.
Agility
is defined as “management concept centered around responsiveness to dynamic and turbulent markets and customer demand”. But it also involves exploiting these changing markets to take advantage from it.
The benefit of the Sarbanes-Oxley-Act of 2002 have been widely discussed. Most people have either a negative or a ambivalent view of the resulting compliance activities.
Usually S-OX is seen in the domain of the accounting and finance departments. Effects on other corporate functions are often neglected.
The article by Kros and Nadler (2010) analyzes why and how supply chain professionals and supply chain activities might be affected by S-OX.
