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).
Today I review an article called “18 Ways to Guard Against Disruption”. It was published in the Supply Chain Management Review in 2005 by Elkins et al.
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.
I just recently had a discussion with a professor at Mahidol University (Bangkok), where I was staying for a research exchange, on how knowledge can be used to mitigate risks within a supply chain.
Today I picked a special article on corporate risks. “How Risky is your Company?” by Robert Simons of the Harvard Business School. Its a more business oriented view on how companies should handle risks, internally. But since internal risk management can be seen as a part of supply chain risk management, I also include it here.
Risk exposure
This article is about how risky one company is. About the internal risk. And by these risks, the author does not so much refer to the production processes, but the softer risks of managing a company.
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).
A supply chain usually does not stand alone. Frequently a supply chain is defined by the need of the end customer which has to be satisfied. Since one company commonly deliver several products, within a single company there can be multiple different supply chains aggregated under one organization. This task of managing multiple supply chains is most often referred to as Supply Chain Portfolio Management. It is still in a very early stage of research, so there are only few researchers focusing on this part.
In 2010 Lassar et al. did a grounded theory study (see here for more information on techniques for theory creation) on the question of what the determinants of strategic supply chain risk management might be?
I am still abroad right now, but nonetheless I still want to keep the German share within the articles high. So I present to you the second article from German authors in just one week. On monday I already talked about Supply Chain Risk Management in the German Automotive Industry and so the second is today on how supply chain risk management is performed during a financial crisis.
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.
