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CSCMP conference and Thailand - This Week in Supply Chain Management (41 / 2011)

Daniel Dumke — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 14:09:00 +0000

I am not a big fan of huge announcements, but some of you already noticed a small change on all pages of this supply chain risk portal: After my wedding in September I took the last name of my wife (Dumke). So just this week I changed all the entries here and adapt a few accounts elsewhere on the internet and now we are up and running again. So right now I use this incident to monitor how fast such changes propagate through the common search engines.
Search engines also helped me finding some of the best articles on the web this week, which I linked below.

News

Big in the news was the Thailand flooding and its impacts on supply chains located there.
- Supply Chain Digital reports of the struggling automobile supply chain. (Supply Chain Digital)
- When I visited Thailand in July, I was also made aware of several of the local hard disk manufacturers. MenaFN has a short story on Seagate’s problems with the floods. (MenaFN)
- Lastly, the Strategic Sourceror summarized two other stories. (Strategic Sourceror)
The World Economic Forum blog also takes a look at supply chain risks, which might also be influenced by financial crises of countries around the world. (ForumBlog)

Blogs

How competition can be useful in times of disruptions is discussed in the “Operations Room”. (Operations Room)

CSCMP conference

As part of last weeks CSCMP conference in Philadelphia IBM provided some details on its Total Risk Assessment Tool. (SC Digest)
Another presentation was about the integration of social media and supply chain management. (Logistics Viewpoints)

If you haven’t done so, also take the time to read my articles for this week.

I Monday’s article I thought and wrote about assessing the vulnerability of a supply chain and found out that the automotive and ICT industries carry the highest supply chain risks.
How do you adjust supply chains for different product types was the topic on Wednesday: Finding the Right Supply Chain for your Product!

Enjoy your weekend!

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Final Impressions of the CSCMP Conference 2010

Daniel Dumke — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:41:00 +0000

Overall I had a great time in San Diego. The location was great and I meet a lot of interesting people and got new insights for my research. The presentations I visited have been very insightful, but mostly I have been very busy meeting with industry leaders for interviews on Supply Chain Design and Risks.

In the last session (Brunch & Closing Session) for example Jack Bacon highlighted upcoming risks for supply chain professionals all over the world. As a futurist he especially emphasized that changes keep accelerating at the moment (eg. compared to a hundred years ago). He used the example of describing one typical day in the life of his ancestors, saying that nowadays it is becoming more and more difficult to find just one day or one common theme which describes the life of one person.
All and all a very interesting talk and I just ordered his book (My Grandfathers’ Clock by Jack Bacon) online.

To conclude the conference I added some pictures of the conference as well.
San Diego Conference Center Ballroom

Ballroom filling with people

Brunch and Closing Session at the CSCMP 2010 Conference

Supply Chain of the Future Presentation

Bleeding Edge Warehouse Technologies at the Supply Chain of the Future Floor

Room for Discussions on the Supply Chain of the Future Floor

GES Warehouse Guided Tour

Tour of the GES Warehouse in San Diego

Performance Evaluation Chart at the GES Warehouse Tour

San Diego Padres

San Diego Padres vs. Chicago Cubs on Tuesday at the Petco Park Stadium

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Supply Chain Risk Management Sessions @CSCMP 2010

Daniel Dumke — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:20:00 +0000

Most of the time during the conference I was busy interviewing companies for my dissertation, but I also found time to listen to some of the sessions on SCRM.

SCRM Keynote

The first session on supply chain risk management was held by Garry Lynch (Marsh, author of “Single Point of Failure”) on Supply Chain Risk Management. The contents were: Challenges, Current State, Successful and unsuccsessful practices.
Sadly, I had to leave before the practice part, but the key strategies can be found in his book mentioned above.

Combining Research and Practice

The second session SCRM was on “Global Supply Chain Resilience”. The presentation was held by: Dow Chemical Company (Darrel Zavitz, Martin Fernandes), Ohio State University (Joseph Fiskel, Center for Resilience), US Air Force (Timothy Pettit). They described a research project on SC resilience and its execution.The first interesting point was their highlighting of the interrelation between sustainability and resilience, since the focus of resilience is on being able to work under changing/turbulent conditions and missing sustainable behavior may exactly lead to these conditions.

The speakers defined supply chain variability as consisting of supply risks, deliberate threats, market change and internal change. Resilience on the other hand is described as the capability to adapt to turbulent change.

On the above mentioned definition Fiskel and Pettit built a framework of resilience consisting of vulnerabilities, capabilities and a resulting zone of balanced resilience.
One underlying premise of the process described below is, that usually SC managers do not worry about the unforeseen but about the familiar, but the goal has to be adaptability to real uncertainty!
Together with Dow Chemical they developed a process of “Design for Resilience” which consists of:

Supply Network Mapping
SCRAM (SC Resilience Assessment and Management) Analysis (vulnerabilities and capabilities, where is improvement potential)
Supply Network Simulation (stress testing the SC, weekly basis, the goal is to find clues how to improve resilience)
Strategy selection (a weighing of increasing capabilities vs. cost has to be done, the suggestion was to use kind of a break even analysis for the probability of an adverse event)

Pettit and Fiskel also build a list of possible vulnerability / capability combinations using literature review, a survey and focus group interviews. They use method triangulation to increase the validity of the resulting listing.

All in all they presented a very business oriented modeling system (including a software using a systems dynamics model) to show effects of different scenarios on the supply chain. It is important to note they are not trying to predict future events, but focus on more general agility and resilience of the SC in case of a disruption.

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CSCMP 2010 conference opening ceremony

Daniel Dumke — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:22:03 +0000

The second day has been a great day at the CSCMP conference.
I started with the Opening Ceremony moderated by Rick Blasgen, he and Bob Silverman and Donald Biggs (Learn, Network, Have fun) introduced this years theme (Learn, Lead, Succeed) and the keynote speakers.
Roger Woody did a nice introduction of the Distinguished Service Award Winner: Charles Taylor, Founder of Awake! Consulting, Speaking about the risks of rising oil prices and the possibilities of supply chain professionals in increasing efficiency to combat the effects. In the afternoon he was (for an American from Texas(!)) underlining his points stating that Supply Chain Professionals worldwide have to look into their planning for the after-peak-oil phase.

Then the key speaker, Carlos M. Gutierrez, former US secretary of trade, was talking about the importance of free trade for supply chain management and vis-versa. He issued a call for the revival of the concept of globalization and stressed current free trade obstacles.
He especially stressed the risks associated with having the wrong models for including currency fluctuations and tariffs into the decision making process (eg. international location decision).

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Strategic Supply Chain Management @CSCMP 2010

Daniel Dumke — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:04:00 +0000

Yesterday I finished the “Strategic Supply Chain Issues” Pre-Conference Workshop “Where Tactical Functionality Meets the Big Picture”. The following key points were intensively discussed:

Fundamental SC Strategies: Operational Excelence (eg. Walmart), Customer Intimacy (like Zara) and Product Leadership (example: Apple)

A broad view on customers has been propagated, customers equal stakeholders
Lean SCM, premise: Thinking of inventory as being without (direct) value for the customer, a strong focus on flexibility and inventory reduction therefore is necessary
Introduction to the method of value stream mapping for Supply Chain Analysis as a Basis for Supply Chain Design
Supply Chain Design: The network should be checked permanently for necessity of change
As the subtitle of the workshop suggests the right communication of the strategy is of the utmost importance. The optimal balance between short term actions and long term strategy have to be sought (without being disaligned)
Importance and categorization of Collaborations (Vendor-Buyer, Focussed, Partnership, Alliance)
Planning (S&OP)
SCM Metrics
SCM Future

But of course there are many, many more things. A really new thing I learned about the definition of core competency:
It’s the “capability to kick their ass”.

Disclaimer: The experiences described here do not necessarily reflect the my views and I haven’t found a singled peer reviewed reference. But that’s business, isn’t it?

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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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CSCMP's Annual Conference: Two days for early bird registration

Daniel Dumke — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:25:00 +0000

Attendees of the CSCMP Annual Conference 2010 who register before April, 30th will receive $400.00 US off the regular registration rates.
So there are only two days left!

The opening keynote will be held by former Kellogg Company CEO Carlos Gutierrez; Jack Bacon is going to close the event, with a talk on “Nonlinear Thinking for the Nonlinear World”.

You have the chance for registration here. The schedule can be found here, scroll to the bottom of the page.

An overview over other conferences on supply chain management for this year can be found in this blog.

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