This Week in Supply Chain Management (17 / 2011)

So what have I been reading this week? There have been several great articles all around the web this week, some from a conceptual view, how to prevent risk and several news stories about recently manifested operational risks.

News

Two large companies have been hit by major “virtual” disruptions. On the other hand the Japanese earthquake still disrupts production at some car makers.

• Sony Servers have been attacked and over 70 million customer files (including credit card information) has been stolen (Wall Street Journal)
• Amazon cloud offerings (EC2) has been hit by an outage with several customers including Foursquare affected (Yahoo)
• Toyota will not be able to run full production until the end of the year due to the quake (NY Times)
• Also, Canon is struggling with the effects (Reuters)
• Overall ratings for all Japanese car makers have been lowered by S&P (BBC)

Blogs

• “Supply chain redesigns: not just about the oil”, discusses the impact of high oil prices on supply chain redesign efforts (Supply Chain Quarterly)
• Acts of God or Acts of Man? Jan Husdal elaborates on the role decision makers play in shaping the effects of desasters (Jan Husdal)
• “Operational Risk Management: Discipline and Professional Development…”, on a related subject: how is operational risk management integrated into todays businesses (Operational Risk Management Blog)

Research / Studies

• Christopher Craighead analyzes the Japan disaster and its aftermath from a researchers perspective (Penn State University)

The current environment is a good example why risk management is an important part of every aspect of supply chain management, be it virtual or real.
I am curious to see the first analyses, if the impact on the japanese car makers is despite SCRM efforts or due to a lack of them. In the last week I wrote about how agile supply chains can be used for risk mitigation and I summarized a great article on the impact of risks on SC performance.

You can complement this listing with your favorite articles in the comment section below.