Today’s article finally closes a gap in the blog that I wanted to close for a while now.
Flexibility can be seen as a key basis for some companies and supply chains as a business strategy and for most companies as an approach for risk mitigation. The article by Duclos et al. presents a flexibility concept from a supply chain point of view and can be used as a foundation for further decisions on the supply chain strategy.
Yet another case study. This time on strategic network design. Why? A major problem for businesses is to find the right strategy for a given situation. And “right” here means optimal (for a given KPI).
Research question might be: Are there general categories which can be used to make different decision situations comparable? And if yes, what would optimal strategies under these circumstances be?
One very important part of supply chain management research is the historical analysis of supply chain practices and properties over time. Just recently I published an article on the development of supply chain strategies over the course of 20 years.
This week is dedicated to the works on supply chain management from Greek supply chain researchers. Today’s article has been published in the Journal of Management Sciences (Omega) by four researchers from northern Greece and the UK.
The Bullwhip Effect was first discovered and analyzed in the 1950s. It triggered more intense research on the supply chain system (even though the term supply chain was not yet coined).
Starting in the early 1980s, this research finally lead to significant changes in real supply chains as well.
This article does a follow up on these developments and evaluates the relative improvements of each of the strategic stages.
This article sheds light on the question of how much flexibility is necessary to secure the supply chain against disruption risks.
The paper reviewed today takes a closer look at three supply chain risks: supply, process and demand risks (figure 1).
How is new knowledge generated in the social sciences? One method is case study research.
Case Study
A case study is an in-depth investigation of a specific question regarding an individual research object, it can be differentiated using the following criteria:
It’s not that there are no articles on supply chain risk management anymore. But after writing on current research in the last weeks (like the one on system failure here) I have been wondering more about the foundations of supply chain management in general. So I decided to review an article today on general supply chain management research, in this case a literature review by Sachan and Datta (2005).
