After the 2004 tsunami, which heavily affected parts of Thailand and Indonesia, national and international disaster response was quick to support the affected regions.
Within several weeks of the disaster, approximately 400 international non government organizations (NGOs) were working in Indonesia alone providing basic assistance to the affected population.
Introduction to disaster relief
Several factors are necessary to improve response activities:
Some weeks ago I wrote about Fisher’s suggestions on how to select the right supply chain for your product. But how to continue from there? How do different products affect the further planning steps needed?
This is another introductory article (book chapter) to supply chain risk management. I included it, since it is an early (2003) view on supply chain risk management from another perspective. Many other articles I reviewed up to now are following the “Cranfield School Approach” with (Christopher, Jüttner, …) and this one by Peter Kajüter (Münster University, Germany) shows a different approach developed in parallel.
Today I present you only one chapter of a great book by Wu and Blackhurst: “Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability” (which can be bought on amazon.com here).
Practitioners often complain about the huge gap between practice and research related to the estimation of risks. In theory all is easy: A disruptive event just gets a probability and outcome assigned. But in practice these figures most often have to be estimated.
Todays article by Knemeyer et al. (2009) covers exactly this dilemma and tries to answer the question of how to plan for a catastrophe.
For many years sustainability risks have been largely neglected. Reputational damages caused by incidents like the Brent Spar platform can reach tens of millions of dollars. But in a supply chain context companies are not only held responsible for their own actions but also for the actions of their suppliers.
In their 2010 paper Foerstl et al. analyze supplier sustainability risk and develop and test a framework for its mitigation.
Many companies are struggling with the idea to use modern optimization techniques to support decision making in strategic supply chain management.
But beside mathematical modeling of the supply chain there are other methods as well, such as network based approaches. In their 2005 paper Blackhurst, Wu and O’Grady present a more intuitive decision support method with the goal to improve decisions within the supply chain context.
Process orientation may or may not be a very hip topic right now. Nevertheless effective processes are a foundation for company performance. Lockamy, Childerhouse, Disney, Towill and McCormack (2008), analyze and explain the impact of process maturity and uncertainty on supply chain performance, the full paper can be obtained here free of charge.
Supply Chain Risk Management started from the need to better control the risks within Supply and Demand Networks. The processes in (Corporate) Risk Management have been developed and convene in the classic, cyclic processes:
