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Retrospective 2011 and Happy Holidays

Daniel Dumke — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:44:00 +0000

The number of daily visitor slowly declines, even the comment spam goes down. It seems that (at least for some parts of the world) the “quiet” time of the year has begun.
And for me this is a great moment to look back. The same time last year I just celebrated my first blog anniversary!

This year we not only had the second birthday in early December, but also entry number 200.

Last years goals

So let’s review the good, the bad and the ugly of 2011.
With the last anniversary I set some goals especially regarding the content and orientation on the blog.
I did travel a lot this year, at least more than usual (Africa, Thailand, Baltic Sea, Mauritius) and in addition I had some “side projects” (wedding) to take care of. Luckily, I still was able to keep up with my schedule: Two new articles per week and, starting in March, also a weekly This Week in Supply Chain Management post, dealing with selected, interesting news of the week (of course this last segment was inspired by a great science podcast with a similar name: TWIS).
Overall I was able to publish 140 articles in 2011.

Numbers

Don’t take me the wrong way. The main question for me is not the number of articles, but the perceived quality. So let’s have a look at the readership:
While the blog had about 1200 readers in December 2010, this number quadrupled to about 5200 visitors with over 8500 page views over the last month; some of them regular readers, some just passing by. The locational distribution is similar to last years: most visitors come from the US, second is India, third UK, forth Germany (figure 1).

Figure 1: Readership in 2011 (Google Analytics)

Of course this huge increase in visitors has been a great motivation for me. And so, my gratitude goes to you, my reader: Thank you for reading my blog and staying interested.

The Top 5

But of course, the view back into 2011 wouldn’t be perfect without a Top 5 list. So as last year, I will provide you with the Top 5 articles of this year.

Number one with a large gap to the next places is the Supply Chain Management Literature Review. A quite short article, which summarizes current literature in supply chain management.
The second article is a contribution to my supply chain risk management thesis series on the Impact of Demographics on Supply Chain Risk Management Practices.
The third article was from early January, 2011 about how to define risk in general in the Definition of Risk.
Measuring the Bullwhip Effect in Supply Chains, deals with a case study on how to measure the bullwhip effect, since you cannot manage what you can’t measure.
The fifth most popular article talks about Agile Supply Chains, defining the concept of agility and how it relates to supply chain management.

The Worst 5

But of course, in the light of the articles mentioned above, there are also articles hidden in the shadows. So this is the list of the 5 worst performing articles in 2011.
And especially this year, I think, that some very informative articles might be hidden there (to be honest, the comparison is not completely fair, since some of the articles have only been published a few weeks ago).

Looking around the corners of my own field, I try to summarize an article about Resilience from a Psychological Perspective. This article also highlights the influence of individual resilience towards the organizational level.
Another article I like quite a lot, published only in November, talks about the different Types of Supply Chains and their attributes.
This article highlights the impact of the Supply Chain Topology on its Performance.
The Approach to evaluate the Firms Supply Chain Strategy as a Conceptual System comes in 2nd to last, it explains a concept to analyze, understand and create supply chain strategies.
Lastly, the least often clicked article is a Case Study on managing Disruptions in Supply Chains

Goals 2012

I am really looking forward to 2012. For the blog 2012 is the Year of Renewal and therefore I have planned some changes to the site.
First of all, there will be a layout change to better address the issue of accessing the large amount of relevant literature, now hidden somewhere in the archive.
Secondly, since I am now in the final stages of my dissertation, I will focus a little bit more on that. For the blog that means that I will have to reduce the amount of new articles a little bit at least until I finish my dissertation.

I wish you happy holidays and a great start in 2012! I will be back on January, 2nd.

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Managing Disruption Risks using Real Options (SCRM Thesis)

Daniel Dumke — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:17:00 +0000

This is the seventh contribution to my series on doctoral and master dissertations on Supply Chain Risk Management. This again is a master thesis from the MIT. An immense effort and dedication is spent on these works only to find the results hidden in the libraries. So the goal is raise interest in the research of my peers.

Author / Topic

This thesis was written by Sophie Pochard already in 2003 as her master thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. It can be downloaded here directly at the MITs web site. It has been supervised by Richard de Neufville, Professor of Engineering Systems and Civil and Environmental Engineering. The title is: Managing Risks of Supply-Chain Disruptions: Dual Sourcing as a Real Option.

Summary

In her thesis Pochard focussed on multi-sourcing as sole risk mitigation strategy. But first the author elaborates on how resilience in a company can be achieved and more interestingly some limitations to resilience with a focus on dual sourcing, which are:

Complexitiy, increasing resilience often also increases the complexity of the supply chain (eg. dual sourcing).
Risk trade offs, having only a single supplier can also reduce risks (eg. protection of intellectual properties).
Cost issues, resilience often increases cost.

To analyze multiple sourcing strategies Pochard then introduces real options, where the definition is similar to that of a financial option contract:

Call options give to their holder the right to undertake an investment, at a cost that is fixed in advance (the exercise price), at or before a given date (the maturity). For example keeping unexploited leases can be assimilated to a call option. Oil companies do not sell or exploit these leases as they want to keep the right to develop them later on; they may, for example, decide to use this right if ever new drilling and production technologies allow to increase recoverable reserve. This is a call option since the exploitation makes it possible to get the income of the underlying. Its exercise price is the investment cost to initiate the production, and the maturity is simply the date until which firms have the authorization to exploit.

So as the next step dual sourcing is modeled as a real option. And the author presents her results in several diagrams where I show three here in the blog (figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1: Strategy Selection depending on Disruption Frequency (Pochard, 2003)

Figure 2: Sensitivity Analysis based on the Price of the local Supplier (Pochard, 2003)

Both independent variables (disruption frequency and cost of local supplier in case of disruption) seem to have a major impact towards the selected strategy. Pochard concludes that the real options can be a valid method to analyze the benefits of different strategies.

Conclusion

I think that her thesis can be used as a basis for a variety of topics. She writes about disruption risks, resilience and risk mitigation strategies, of course the definition of real options and how to develop and deploy a corresponding model.
I also think that this variety is also the major weakness of this work. Compared to my last MIT master thesis (Impact of demographics on supply chain risk management practices) Pochard takes a very long time to get to the real topic and browses a long time through other connected fields.
Nonetheless the results are very interesting and seem to be comparable to other (later) papers.

Reference:

Pochard, S. (2003). Managing Risks of Supply-Chain Disruptions: Dual Sourcing as a Real Option Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Master Thesis

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Supply Chain Resilience: Development of a Conceptual Framework, an Assessment Tool and an Implementation Process

Daniel Dumke — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:54:00 +0000

This is the sixth contribution to my series on doctoral dissertations on supply chain risk management. An immense effort and dedication is spent on these works only to find the results hidden in the libraries. So the goal is raise interest in the research of my peers.

Author / Topic

This dissertation was written by Timothy J. Pettit and published as his doctoral thesis at The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA in 2008. It can be downloaded here.
I have already seen his presentation of the results in 2010 at the CSCMP conference in San Diego together with Joseph Fiskel. His current employer is still the US Airforce, now as Assistant Professor of Logistics and Supply Chain Management.

The title of his thesis is:
Supply Chain Resilience: Development of a Conceptual Framework, an Assessment Tool and an Implementation Process

Summary

In his dissertation Pettit develops a framework and processes to improve implementation of resilience into supply chains. His thesis is devided into three parts:

Development of a supply chain resilience framework, based on literature and focus group workshops. The building blocks “vulnerabilities” and “capabilities” emerge as main dimension (see figures below).
Building on this framework Pettit creates an assessment tool (SCRAM) and tests the tool with seven global manufacturing supply chains, by evaluating their current state.
In this part critical links between vulnerability and controllable capabilities are identified and analyzed.

I will not quote the whole dissertation here. But I want to show two graphics from his work highlighting the relationship between capabilities, vulnerabilities and resilience.
Figure 1 shows the first proposition and basically the operationalized definition of resilience: When vulnerabilities decrease and capabilities increase resilience increases.

Figure 1: Measuring Resilience using Capabilities and Vulnerabilities (Pettit, 2008)

Since capabilities are usually costly and vulnerabilities often fixed, figure 2 suggest that there is an optimum balance of capabilities and vulnerabilities in the Zone of Balanced Resilience.

Figure 2: Zone of Balanced Resilience (Pettit, 2008)

Finally, Figure 3 finally presents the combined framework.

Figure 3: Supply Chain Resilience Framework (click to enlarge; Pettit, 2008)

Conclusion

As with Tomlin’s thesis the dissertation is split into three separate parts which are cumulated into the thesis.

Resilience is a necessity if you agree that some risks are just not forecast-able and hedge-able by traditional means. Overall Pettit designed a great way to assess resilience, and this is definitely not just an academic discussion, for businesses it is equally important to measure resilience to, a) be up to date about improvement activities and b) being able to get these activities started in the first place by showing improvement potential:

Although further validation is required, managers should be encouraged to make the minimal investment required to determine their current state of resilience and compare their strategy with the resilience fitness space.

Reference:

Pettit, T.J. (2008). Supply Chain Resilience: Development of a Conceptual Framework, an Assessment Tool and an Implementation Process The Ohio State University, Dissertation

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First Anniversary

Daniel Dumke — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 10:06:00 +0000

Today is the first anniversary of this blog so I wanted to take the time for some review of the insights I gained during this time.

History / Statistics

Exactly one year ago I started this blog, with the goal to publish interesting results from research and to foster an open exchange between research and business. Furthermore I wanted to generate an continuous output to monitor my own progress during my research and keep a public log of selected articles.

Within the last seven month my research made some headway as well, I nearly finished my in-depth interviews with supply chain professionals from all over the world, to get an overview of the state of the art in business. Furthermore I started building my supply chain model using an agent based simulation framework.

Visitors from all over the World (Google Analytics)

Up to now the blog has far exceeded my expectations. 76 articles have been published, for about 1.5 articles per week and at the moment about 1200 readers from all over the world visit the blog each month, with heavy users in the US, UK, India and Germany (see figure). Most of the contacts I met for my research have been acquired through this blog and I received some inquiries for co-publications as well.

Goals

I am going to continue my research, the focus will be on the analysis and evaluation of the conducted interviews, especially comparing them with the previous works in literature and the results from my own model.
For the blog I plan on increasing the article count even further, focussing on the same topics: supply chain strategy, design, and its risks.
In the last few weeks I already made some improvements to the site itself, like the “Categories” plugin on the right sidebar or listing the “Top 5 Entries”, to make navigation easier. And I am also working on showing articles by the same authors that I reviewed.

I am always keen on knowing more about what you think. So contact me if you have suggestions for subjects I should cover, articles to review, or improvements to the site and content.
Let me know what you think!

Stay in touch

For your convenience there are several methods to subscribe to this blog for free.

You can follow me on Twitter, where I will post links to new articles and sometimes other supply chain related posts
You can also use your favorite RSS reader to subscribe to the full length posts and
You can have new articles delivered directly to your email inbox

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Supply Chain Design: Capacity, Flexibility and Wholesale Price Strategies

Daniel Dumke — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 16:49:00 +0000

This is the forth contribution to my series on doctoral dissertations on Supply Chain Risk Management. An immense effort and dedication is spent on these works only to find the results hidden in the libraries. So the goal is raise interest in the research of my peers.

Author / Topic

This dissertation was written by Brian Tomlin in 1999 as his doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. It can be downloaded here at his homepage at his current employer (Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth). The title is:

Supply Chain Design: Capacity, Flexibility and Wholesale Price Strategies

Summary

Tomlin cumulates three distinct topics and analyzes them in depth in his dissertation. His core question is always the supply chain design, with demand uncertainty as the dominant risk.

Wholesale Pricing Strategies
Using a game theoretic model with two actors (supplier and manufacturer) he explores the best strategies for setting the wholesale price. The objective is to maximize the supply chain profit (think of it as a return on investment in the supply chain). He shows, that no matter if quantity-discount or quantity-premium pricing schedules are used, non-linear pricing schedules outperform linear pricing schedules.
Process Flexibility Strategies
He then tackles flexibility strategies in a multi-product, multi-stage supply chain environment. He first identifies two inefficiencies which only occur in a multi-stage environment, namely stage-spanning bottlenecks and floating bottlenecks. He develops a mathematical supply chain optimization model and based on the results he concludes, that “in supply chains with a large number of products or stages, additional flexibility is advisable, especially for stages in which the capacity is not much greater than the expected demand.”
Capacity Decision
With this chapter on capacity decision making in multi-product, multi-stage supply chains he walks on new grounds, since up to then only single-stage models have been analyzed. He uses two criterion for his analysis: service level and expected shortfall. The results of his analysis show that under optimal capacity allocation: for every stage must hold true: for a small increase in a stage’s capacity, the decrease in shortfall divided by the capacity cost should be the same for all stages.

Conclusion

I have to admit that I do not really like the segregated design of the thesis itself, analyzing one topic in depth usually should be sufficient for one dissertation. On the other hand the work by Tomlin on the three topics would probably also have sufficed for two or three separate dissertations as well.

Compared to other dissertations I read it was refreshing to see, that he did not spend (too) much time on making an in depth literature review beforehand but focussed very much on his own works.

Reference:

Brian T. Tomlin (2000). Supply Chain Design: Capacity, Flexibility and Wholesale Price Strategies Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dissertation

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Supplier Selection in a Turbulent World

Daniel Dumke — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 09:42:00 +0000

At the moment I am focussing more on the interviews I am conducting for my research, so I am not reading as much anymore. I therefore try to select articles which are both useful for my research and my blog.

Today I read an article with the fuzzy title “Supply chain risk in turbulent environments — A conceptual model for managing supply chain network risk” by Peter Trkman and Kevin McCormack.

The authors present a framework for the identification and prediction of supply risk.

Conceptual Framework for assessing Supplier Risk (Trkman and McCormack 2009)

Risk and Turbulence

The authors define risk as an adverse event with a given likelihood and outcome. They further distinguish the source of risks similar to Christopher and Peck (2004) depending on the origin of the risk: a) Endogenous uncertainty (from within the Supply Chain) and b) Exogenous uncertainty (discrete events and continuous risks). Turbulence is not defined per se but turbulent conditions are defined by …

… frequent and unpredictable market and/or technological changes with in an industry which accentuate risk and create an inability to forecast accurately.

Major drivers of turbulence are market and technological turbulence.

Prediction of supplier risk

Supplier Performance and Uncertainty Matrix (Trkman and McCormack, 2009)

The authors suggest to measure the supplier performance on three levels:

strategic (eg. quality)
tactical (eg. order cycle time) and
operational (eg. number of complaints).

But they also admit that these indicators are not sufficient to predict supplier risks and should be enhanced by additional information on the the supply chain (type and structure) and the business structure. All factors can be found in the figure above.

These indicators then form the basis for a decision on the supplier portfolio. To support this process the authors also developed a supplier performance and uncertainty matrix.

Conclusion

I liked the idea of the article: How can you best identify and assess/predict risks in the supply chain? This is one of the most important questions in Supply Chain Risk Management. But I think the implementation leaves more holes than it needs to.

The Pros:

The authors are conceptualizing a more holistic approach to assess supplier risk
They also give hints on how to this process can be supported (by the matrix for supplier selection)

The Cons:

I would have loved to see more detail on many of the points mentioned, so I would think twice before using the framework without modification.

Fuzzy wording

The title promised new research on supply chain risk in turbulent environments, but the article was only about the supplier selection process. Until chapter three it was not made clear that the authors are only talking about supplier risk (before it was still called supply risk). And there is no explanation on why they used risk and uncertainty interchangeably
Definitions

I did not find a definition for turbulence or any other term beside “risk” (see above)
Framework

Due to the fact that the framework is conceptual I would have loved to see more arguments on why the selected factors have been chosen and why the framework is complete.
Matrix

Even though I like this way of thinking about the supplier selection, the matrix is flawed since the axis are not independent (performance usually is contingent on the turbulence around, but I have to admit that’s the same for the Growth-Share-Matrix as well)
Prediction

The authors talk about predicting the risk of suppliers, but do not give any (conceptual) hint on how to do this with the given framework.

I hope this review was helpful for you! If you have any comments, questions or suggestions you can use the comment section below or contact me directly.

Reference:

Trkman, P., & McCormack, K. (2009). Supply chain risk in turbulent environments—A conceptual model for managing supply chain network risk International Journal of Production Economics, 119 (2), 247-258 DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2009.03.002

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Supply Chain Design - Robust Planning with differentiated Supplier Selection

Daniel Dumke — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:28:00 +0000

This is the third contribution to my series on doctoral dissertations on Supply Chain Risk Management. An immense effort and dedication is spent on these works only to find the results hidden in the libraries. So the goal is raise interest in the research of my peers.

Author / Topic

This dissertation was written by Stephanie Freiwald in 2005 as her doctoral thesis at the University of Bochum. It was published by Peter Lang, Frankfurt a.M. and can be ordered here from amazon.deor your local library. The title can be translated as:

Supply Chain Design – Robust Planning with differentiated Supplier Selection

Summary

In her work Freiwald builds a mathematical model of a four echelon supply chain (supplier, producer, distributor / inventory, customer) starting with a literature review of existing models. Building up from there she first adds variables to include sophisticated criteria for the supplier selection extending the traditional price-only selection.

Robustness can be oriented towards the models optimality, reliability, result-robustness and goal robustness. So as the next step the author set the goal to include robustness to uncertainty and unsettled preferences of the decision maker to the model.

As a final step the author applies her model to an industrial case, with the goal to find optimal, robust solutions for an Supply Chain Design problem.

Conclusion

Stephanie Freiwald’s work stands apart in including multiple aspects of the supply chain design problem into one concise model for optimization without neglecting the implementation of such a “theoretical” model.

Reference:

Stephanie Freiwald (2005). Supply Chain Design – Robuste Planung mit differenzierter Auswahl der Zulieferer Peter Lang, Frankfurt a.M., Dissertation

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Process oriented Risk Management of Product Risks (Dissertation)

Daniel Dumke — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 23:36:00 +0000

This is the second contribution to my series on doctoral dissertations on Supply Chain Risk Management. An immense effort and dedication is spent on these works only to find the results hidden in the libraries. So the goal is raise interest in their research.

Author / Topic

This dissertation was written by Jörn Dahmen 2009 as his doctoral thesis at the RWTH, Aachen (one of the most renowned Technical Universities in Germany). It was published by Shaker, Aachen and can be ordered here from amazon.deor your local library. The title can be translated as:

Process oriented Risk Management of Product Risks

Summary

The dissertation is a short read with 140 pages. The goal of this dissertation is to create a framework for the management of product risks. Product risks combine the risks associated with the product. Nowadays the risks associated with the product-customer relationship are usually highly regulated by law (product liability), so increasing product complexity can lead to higher product risks.

The framework is straight forward and consists of three elements:

Risk management elements
containing the risk policy, analysis, measures and monitoring
Drill down view
The aforementioned risk management process has to be repeatedly executed for different levels of detail in the company.
Execution
The measures have the be elaborated in teams and executed to be effective.

The author then tests his framework at three different companies (automobile, turbine and cable car producer) and provides evidence that his framework is effective in managing product risks.

Conclusion

Jörn Dahmen delivers a well structured work on product risks and its management. The focus the dissertation sheds light on an often neglected risk. The case studies were interesting and supported the study very well. Caveat: I was missing some really new aspects on the differences of managing product risks.

Reference:

Dahmen, Jörn (2002). Prozeßorientiertes Risikomanagement zur Handhabung von Produktrisiken Shaker, Aachen, Dissertation

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Risk considerations in Purchasing

Daniel Dumke — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:37:00 +0000

Today I start an irregular series on doctoral dissertations on Supply Chain Risk Management. An immense effort and dedication is spent on these works only to find the results hidden in libraries. So the goal is raise interest in their research.

Author / Topic

The first dissertation was written by Ingo Schneider in 2009 as his doctoral thesis at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, Germany. It was published by Shaker, Aachen and can be ordered here from amazon.deor your local library. The title translates in:

Risk as Strategic Part of the Supply Chain Design: Analysis and Case Study in the German Automobile Industry

Summary

The goal of this dissertation is to create a framework for finding strategies to optimally design the supply side of a supply chain. The author starts with basic thoughts about the risk management in supply chain design and uses a case study to test his results within the German automobile industry.

His research finishes with an eight step framework that should lead to optimal supply chain design.

Develop strategies to consistently assess risks within the supply chain
Work out the possible structural decisions for the SC
Determine packages of measures that should be used
Assemble the necessary price and cost information
Develop a concept for the risk management and analyze the supply chain
Calculate the cost of the risks
Present the optimal connections to the supply and demand side from a monetary point of view
Discuss the risks to reach a final decision

Conclusion

Ingo Schneider’s work shows a clear path to optimal design of the supply side of the chain. He writes very detailed about the basics of supply chain risk management and takes special care to highlight the methodological aspects of his study.

Reference:

Schneider, Ingo (2009). Die Risikobetrachtung in der Beschaffung als strategische Komponente im Supply-Chain-Design : eine Analyse am Beispiel Karosserieblechteile in der Automobilindustrie Shaker, Aachen, Dissertation

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iPad for the Researcher

Daniel Dumke — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:18:00 +0000

I just read an nice article evaluating the pros and cons (mostly pros) for using an Apple iPad as a tool for researchers.

See yourself: iPad Review: 60 days and 6 reasons why you need it

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Creating a Reference Tree from an existing PDF Collection

Daniel Dumke — Tue, 11 May 2010 04:37:00 +0000

I am currently in the Snowballing Phase of the Systematic Review approach (explained here). So I already have accumulated a amount of papers (most of them as PDF files) for my current research goals using a keyword search on several databases (Econis, EBSCOhost and ScienceDirect, etc.).

Problem

Now I thought about how to proceed with the analysis of the references mentioned in the papers I already found. I was afraid, that the amount of work necessary, to make a manual analysis of all papers available in my library and manually would be just overwhelming.
My calculation was as follows: My library for this goal consists of 200+ papers, let’s assume each with 15 references, thereof seven already in my library. From the remaining eight references per paper, three are going to be relevant for my research.

So in sum I would have to screen over 3000 references (for relevance for my research goal and for existence in my library) and have to manually copy and paste 600 papers into a database search engine.
Even if I am very fast it sounds like hours of monotone, uninteresting labor.

Solution

Usually in those situations I try to rely on the internet to help me with a tool, but after I made a thorough search I did not find anything which could help me with my problem.

So at the moment I am reactivating my Python skills and learning something about regular expression to turn something like this quote from a PDF:

Spira, L.F. and Page, M. (2002), “Risk management: the reinvention of internal control and the changing role of internal audit”, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 640-61.
Steele, P. and Court, B. (1996), Profitable Purchasing Strategies: A Manager’s Guide for Improving Organizational Competitiveness through the Skills of Purchasing, McGraw-Hill, London.
Tchankova, L. (2002), “Risk identification – basic stage in risk management”, Environmental Management and Health, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 290-7.
Treleven, M. and Schweikhart, S.B. (1988), “A risk/benefit analysis of sourcing strategies: single vs multiple sourcing”, Journal of Operations Management, Vol. 7 No. 4, pp. 93-114.

Into a list of author-year-title-combinations which can be automatically compared to my existing library (using Papers) and made into a search query at Google Scholar or a similar database.

Status

At the moment I am making good progress with the core pattern matching. The open questions are how to read from the PDF files and how to compare the results to my existing library (using title and author or only title).
I will post update.

Future work could then analyze the possibility to create a reference tree connecting the literature within a library to show “connections of thought” between them.

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Cranfield Systematic Review Approach

Daniel Dumke — Sun, 09 May 2010 09:51:00 +0000

My professor gave me the hint to look for a systematic literature review approach which has been used at Cranfield University in the UK. Actually I found the description of a methodology to be used for a “systematic review”, that can be quite useful. It relies on six principles.

The approach addresses one or more clearly specified question
Involvement of many participants
The goal is to find all published and unpublished studies on a specific topic
Criteria for selection of studies are designed a priori and documented
Findings are summarized in a transparent and accessible format
Synthesis of the findings is necessary to make clear which parts of the questions can be answered and which parts are not known

These goals are achieved by following a ten step process:

Design a review plan and -protocol
It should contain the research strategy, including review questions, study selection criteria, procedures for data extration and synthesis, and a timetable
Review group
which consists of a) advisors, giving strategic advise and b) supporters, helping in the day to day analysis
Review question(s)
Formultate the review questions according to the CIMO method, including context, intervention of an actor, mechanisms at work, outcome of the intervention
Search
use different search strategies (defined in the review plan) eg. protocol driven, snow balling and personal knowledge
Select relevant studies
use the predefined criteria for selecting the relevant literature
Rate the quality of the studies
Extract information
systematically collect the information from the studies selected
Synthesis findings
Reporting
Describe an analysis of the field, present what is known and not yet known
Inform research, policy and practice

Conclusion

Using this approach has many advantages over “just reading the papers”. The major drawback though is, that it needs experience and patience to create the review plan. All necessary research questions have to be raised already at the beginning of the endeavor, since only this can provide for a consistent analysis of the literature.

Reference:

Cranfield Systematic Review

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Ready for CSCMP Conference 2010

Daniel Dumke — Mon, 03 May 2010 11:08:00 +0000

I am going to San Diego. Today I just received the confirmation for the CSCMP Annual Global Conference 2010. Beside the other conferences, the CSCMP is one of the major events this year.

Since I am already in the vicinity (visiting Japan for vacation) I extended my trip to Los Angeles / San Diego.

I am expecting to get exciting new insights to supply chain management, and especially meet other people from research and business. As soon as the program is fixed I am going to post an update here.

If you are going, too, and you want to meet, drop me a note in the comments section or on Twitter (SCRMBlog).

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Supply Chain Manager of the Future

Daniel Dumke — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:50:00 +0000

“Management Development and the Supply Chain Manager of the Future” by J. Mangan and M. Christopher (2005) aims to bridge the gap between current offerings of knowledge providers (eg. universities), current capabilities of users (eg. students and managers) and buyers (aka. companies).First it seems to be a good idea to get an impression of the demographics of the current supply chain managers. The Supply Chain Management Research Group at Ohio State found in a study, that nearly 95 percent of the supply chain managers are male, median age of managers 39 and about 20% have an additional professional qualification (eg. APICS). It’s also quite interesting to note that the average time the managers worked in the field of supply chain management is about 18 years combined with a high job rotation.

It is also highlighted how these SC-professionals gain the foundation of their knowledge.

In decreasing order of frequency: formal college, in-house training, seminar / workshop, ‘on the job’, and in-house training with an external trainer. Three major institutions are identified to support the professional education. First, so called professional bodies (like CSCMP), second, tertiary education at universities and lastly, publicly funded centres of excellence (like The MIT – Zaragoza International Logistics Program).

The authors argue that the current business transformation processes lead to a special need for experience and education for supply chain managers (this is taken from Christopher, 2004). For example:

The transformation from supplier-centric to customer-centric SCM, leads to the design of customer-driven supply chains, therefore a manager needs market understanding and customer insight.

In their own research they asked the provider-side (universities) what key changes they see to enhance the education. These are the main topics:

Specific logistics competencies are required for emerging markets.
Courses need to be more practical.
Multimodal nature of logistics and SCM needs to be highlighted more.
Need to differentiate between different learners.
Focus on processes and flows.
In-class exercises.
Best practice exists within certain companies.

The goal is to train the future supply chain manager to acquire the knowledge in the following areas:

General

Finance
IT
Management / Strategy

Logistics & Supply Chain Management

Operations
Focus on processes / flows
Legal, security and international trade
Multimodal logistics
Logistics in emerging markets

Competencies / Skills

Analytical
Interpersonal
Leadership
Change management
Project management

Conclusion

On the plus side the article summarizes the literature about the key qualifications, knowledge and skills which are necessary for supply chain managers to cope with the requirements of a changing business.

But on the other side the research part seems to be unilaterally focussing on the provider side, and there especially on the universities. Not only is one of the three randomly selected (?) public funded institutions located at the Hull University (home of the lead author), but also one of the research questions “What are the optimum approaches for career development?” was posed only to the provider side. I guess the result (Masters degree is listed first) does not come as a surprise.

Reference:

Mangan, J., & Christopher, M. (2005). Management development and the supply chain manager of the future The International Journal of Logistics Management, 16 (2), 178-191 DOI: 10.1108/09574090510634494

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