In retrospect forecasts of the future often seem dull or at least miss important aspects of the actual realization. In 2000 the Ritchie and Brindley analyzed effects of the uprising Internet on supply chain management and especially newly emerging risks associated with them for small and medium sized enterprises. I wrote this review from the view of 2000 as well so you can decide yourself to what degree you see their hypothesis already fulfilled.
Risk in supply chains can be included in several different ways into the decision making process.
No Risk
A statement in many supply chain models is that some/most/all parameters of the model are fixed (e.g. fixed demand, zero probability of a hurricane).
The result is, if the real value of this parameter diverges from the assumptions, the results of the model will be flawed to a certain degree (up to completely unusable).
Today I introduce you to the process of measuring agility in a supply chain. Agility is a major concept in the research of the last 10 years or so. I already have written some articles on this topic:
Yet another case study. This time on strategic network design. Why? A major problem for businesses is to find the right strategy for a given situation. And “right” here means optimal (for a given KPI).
Research question might be: Are there general categories which can be used to make different decision situations comparable? And if yes, what would optimal strategies under these circumstances be?
Many companies are struggling with the idea to use modern optimization techniques to support decision making in strategic supply chain management.
But beside mathematical modeling of the supply chain there are other methods as well, such as network based approaches. In their 2005 paper Blackhurst, Wu and O’Grady present a more intuitive decision support method with the goal to improve decisions within the supply chain context.
Aviation and steering a company can be viewed as somehow alike. At least this is the starting point for the article by Srinivas (2009) reviewed today.
Aviation Analogy
But unlike companies a pilot has some advantages: a clear starting point, a given destination, he knows on which path to get there, he knows anytime if he is off course and he also knows how to get back on track.
Experts from research and business alike argue that within the last decades consumers have grown to be a more demanding factor for supply chain management. At the same time manufacturing and supply chain strategies adapted to this development (from lean to agile, see Christopher and Towill, 2000).
Is there consensus about the role of product design as the leading function in the supply chain? Not yet! This article introduces the topic of integrating decisions in product and supply chain design and gives a short glimpse on the “how to implement” part.
Submitted by Daniel Dumke on Wed, 2010-11-24 17:49
Paper
Supply Chain Design: Capacity, Flexibility and Wholesale Price Strategies
Published In:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dissertation
Year:
2000
This is the forth contribution to my series on doctoral dissertations on Supply Chain Risk Management. An immense effort and dedication is spent on these works only to find the results hidden in the libraries. So the goal is raise interest in the research of my peers.
