Product design and Inventories - This Week in Supply Chain Management (30 / 2011)

Even though I read a lot of news this week, there wasn’t much supply chain related. But on the bright side this week has brought several great blog posts that I like to share with you.

News

• First and last: the Financial Times has aggregated several reports of high inventory of high tech companies and the implications on the supply chains and economies. (FT)
  
  

Blog

• Dustin Mattison has a nice interview up on his Kinaxis Blog with a procurement manager. They discuss new sources of supply chain risk and driving factors and strategies to mitigate them. (Dustin Mattison)
• Richard Faint of the Hull University (UK) summarized some highlights of a meeting with the researchers Omera Khan and Martin Christopher, who’s articles have been covered in this blog here and here, on product design and how it is related to supply chain management. He also shows some of the product design and organizational measures used to keep agility in the supply chain up. (Supply Chain Logistics)
• Also have a look at the book review by Jan Husdal on “The Resilient Organization – How Adaptive Cultures Thrive Even when Strategy Fails”. (Jan Husdal)

Conferences

• This week I want to highlight two conferences: The first is the “3rd Supply Chain Risk Management Seminar” by Icon Events* on September, 26 & 27 in Barcelona. (Icon Events)
• The second: The Supply Chain Council (SCC) features an Executive Summit with the topic “Reinventing Supply Chain Strategy for Performance and Risk”, from September, 28-30 2011 in Palm Springs. I just added it to my conference list of 2011 as well. (SCC)

If you have not read my articles of this week, have a look at the following:

• Monday: First up this week was the theme of simplification in Simplified Supply Chain Flows.
• Wednesday: Next came a nice article on Simulation as a Tool for Supply Chain Optimization, which brought a great measures for the effectiveness of supply chain simulation.

*) Icon Events is an official partner of the SCRM Blog.