Retrospective 2011 and Happy Holidays

The number of daily visitor slowly declines, even the comment spam goes down. It seems that (at least for some parts of the world) the “quiet” time of the year has begun.
And for me this is a great moment to look back. The same time last year I just celebrated my first blog anniversary!

This year we not only had the second birthday in early December, but also entry number 200.

Last years goals

So let’s review the good, the bad and the ugly of 2011.
With the last anniversary I set some goals especially regarding the content and orientation on the blog.
I did travel a lot this year, at least more than usual (Africa, Thailand, Baltic Sea, Mauritius) and in addition I had some “side projects” (wedding) to take care of. Luckily, I still was able to keep up with my schedule: Two new articles per week and, starting in March, also a weekly This Week in Supply Chain Management post, dealing with selected, interesting news of the week (of course this last segment was inspired by a great science podcast with a similar name: TWIS).
Overall I was able to publish 140 articles in 2011.

Numbers

Don’t take me the wrong way. The main question for me is not the number of articles, but the perceived quality. So let’s have a look at the readership:
While the blog had about 1200 readers in December 2010, this number quadrupled to about 5200 visitors with over 8500 page views over the last month; some of them regular readers, some just passing by. The locational distribution is similar to last years: most visitors come from the US, second is India, third UK, forth Germany (figure 1).

Figure 1: Readership in 2011 (Google Analytics)

Of course this huge increase in visitors has been a great motivation for me. And so, my gratitude goes to you, my reader: Thank you for reading my blog and staying interested.

The Top 5

But of course, the view back into 2011 wouldn’t be perfect without a Top 5 list. So as last year, I will provide you with the Top 5 articles of this year.

1. Number one with a large gap to the next places is the Supply Chain Management Literature Review. A quite short article, which summarizes current literature in supply chain management.
2. The second article is a contribution to my supply chain risk management thesis series on the Impact of Demographics on Supply Chain Risk Management Practices.
3. The third article was from early January, 2011 about how to define risk in general in the Definition of Risk.
4. Measuring the Bullwhip Effect in Supply Chains, deals with a case study on how to measure the bullwhip effect, since you cannot manage what you can’t measure.
5. The fifth most popular article talks about Agile Supply Chains, defining the concept of agility and how it relates to supply chain management.

The Worst 5

But of course, in the light of the articles mentioned above, there are also articles hidden in the shadows. So this is the list of the 5 worst performing articles in 2011.
And especially this year, I think, that some very informative articles might be hidden there (to be honest, the comparison is not completely fair, since some of the articles have only been published a few weeks ago).

1. Looking around the corners of my own field, I try to summarize an article about Resilience from a Psychological Perspective. This article also highlights the influence of individual resilience towards the organizational level.
2. Another article I like quite a lot, published only in November, talks about the different Types of Supply Chains and their attributes.
3. This article highlights the impact of the Supply Chain Topology on its Performance.
4. The Approach to evaluate the Firms Supply Chain Strategy as a Conceptual System comes in 2nd to last, it explains a concept to analyze, understand and create supply chain strategies.
5. Lastly, the least often clicked article is a Case Study on managing Disruptions in Supply Chains

Goals 2012

I am really looking forward to 2012. For the blog 2012 is the Year of Renewal and therefore I have planned some changes to the site.
First of all, there will be a layout change to better address the issue of accessing the large amount of relevant literature, now hidden somewhere in the archive.
Secondly, since I am now in the final stages of my dissertation, I will focus a little bit more on that. For the blog that means that I will have to reduce the amount of new articles a little bit at least until I finish my dissertation.

I wish you happy holidays and a great start in 2012! I will be back on January, 2nd.