Supply chain mapping can be a great tool to foster the understanding and from its results improve a supply chain network overall. Supply chain mapping can also be used to analyze the risks of a supply chain and improve its resilience (for an example in the blog follow this link).
This review is about a preprint article which already has been accepted for publication by the “European Journal of Operational Research”. But since there is only a limited space for articles in each issue of the journal, final publication of the article is delayed.
This again is an old classic in supply chain risk literature. In 1997 Marshall L. Fisher published this article in the Harvard Business Review targeting a simple question: “What is the Right Supply Chain for Your Product?”
It is noteworthy that this appears to be one of the most often cited papers in supply chain management. So I overlook the fact that it is quite weak on the methodological foundations.
Today’s paper is brand new and based on the dissertation works of Roberto Perez-Franco. It can be considered as a summary of the current state of the art in supply chain strategy and extends knowledge in the field of strategy evaluation. It can be downloaded for example from Yossi Sheffi’s homepage at the MIT.
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’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.
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 time I’d like to have a look at supply chain risk management from a strategic point of view: What are the prerequisites in the design and culture of an organization to mitigate supply chain risks? The title of the article I review today is: “The organizational antecedents of a firm’s supply chain agility for risk mitigation and response”.
Method
The authors use structural equation modeling technique to establish the relations within their model (figure 1).
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.
