Predictions - This Week in Supply Chain Management (50 / 2011)

Week 50 in 2011 is nearly over. And in the spirit of the season also the news level seems to go down.
For the last weeks and month I use my spare time to create a new web site design to improve the readability and accessibility of the content on this page. But, I am sure you like surprises so I will not spoil it for you… Should be ready some time in January!

As if my computer knew that I had some time to spare, my home server (with mails, movies and other media) decided to break down for a change… So, since Thursday morning I am working to analyze the problem and reinstall the backup – redundancy is a great strategy, not only for supply chains.
After years of self-hosting, this incident led me to the decision to focus more on my core competencies :-) and so I moved my mail archive from the last 8 years from my server to a google mail account.

News

• Kühne + Nagel (German – International 3 and 4PL) just received two awards one as the “Seafreight Forwarder of the Year” and another one for their efforts in “Supply Chain Risk Management” from the Supply Chain Asia Magazine. (India Info Line)
• CNN summarized some of the recent disasters and their impact on supply chains world wide. (CNN)

Research and blogs

• MHL refers you to a new report by the Tompkins Supply Chain Consortium on “Network Design Practices”. You’ll need to register (free) to download the report. (MHL)
• @risk summarizes some of the preliminary results of another study by IDC on the top 10 predictions of asian manufacturing companies. (atrisk)
• The Tech News World has an interesting article on the effects of the Thai floods on Intel and the difficulties highly complex products bring to managing risk effectively. (TNW)

This week first started as a greek week, with an article on Optimal Design of Supply Chain Networks under uncertain Demand, but then I finally managed to aggregate the Supply Chain Conferences 2012 so I published those first. Therefore the second article of the greek week will be published on Monday.

Enjoy your weekend.