Introduction - This Week in Supply Chain Management (48 / 2011)

Four weeks to go in 2011. And only about three weeks to the next holidays. Since retailers like amazon.comwith their efficient supply chains make it easy to order presents up to the last minute, the holidays become less of an logistics / operational problem and focus could be set on the strategic aspects: What to give to whom, … But against my tradition of buying the Christmas presents already in October, this year I am quite late and so I really have to rely on the fast shipment options by my favorite online stores…

Blogs

• A researcher-colleague from Berlin’s University of Technology just started a blog on supply chain management research as well. This week he published a link to a 8 minute video introduction to supply chain management from Arizona State University: "Welcome to supply chain management, where all of your supply chain dreams are about to come true..." (SCM Research)
• Value Unchained answers the question why Santa’s supply chain will not make it in the Top 25. (Value Unchained)
• Enterra Insights already posted the third part of a series of articles on supply chain risk management and disaster mitigation. Here is 1 and 2. (Enterra Insights Part 3)

Research

• I just found this reading list from a course on “Resilience in Organizations” at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, it contains references to several great papers on that topic and some are even available for download. (University of Wisconsin-Parkside)

This week I wrote about…

• On Monday I described a framework to categorize Types of Supply Chains.
• On Wednesday, I (re-)introduced the method of Value Stream Mapping, this time including uncertainties.

See you on Monday, enjoy your weekend!