Product design and Inventories - This Week in Supply Chain Management (30 / 2011)

Daniel Dumke — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:34:00 +0000

Even though I read a lot of news this week, there wasn’t much supply chain related. But on the bright side this week has brought several great blog posts that I like to share with you.

News

First and last: the Financial Times has aggregated several reports of high inventory of high tech companies and the implications on the supply chains and economies. (FT)

Blog

Dustin Mattison has a nice interview up on his Kinaxis Blog with a procurement manager. They discuss new sources of supply chain risk and driving factors and strategies to mitigate them. (Dustin Mattison)
Richard Faint of the Hull University (UK) summarized some highlights of a meeting with the researchers Omera Khan and Martin Christopher, who’s articles have been covered in this blog here and here, on product design and how it is related to supply chain management. He also shows some of the product design and organizational measures used to keep agility in the supply chain up. (Supply Chain Logistics)
Also have a look at the book review by Jan Husdal on “The Resilient Organization – How Adaptive Cultures Thrive Even when Strategy Fails”. (Jan Husdal)

Conferences

This week I want to highlight two conferences: The first is the “3rd Supply Chain Risk Management Seminar” by Icon Events* on September, 26 & 27 in Barcelona. (Icon Events)
The second: The Supply Chain Council (SCC) features an Executive Summit with the topic “Reinventing Supply Chain Strategy for Performance and Risk”, from September, 28-30 2011 in Palm Springs. I just added it to my conference list of 2011 as well. (SCC)

If you have not read my articles of this week, have a look at the following:

Monday: First up this week was the theme of simplification in Simplified Supply Chain Flows.
Wednesday: Next came a nice article on Simulation as a Tool for Supply Chain Optimization, which brought a great measures for the effectiveness of supply chain simulation.

*) Icon Events is an official partner of the SCRM Blog.

Tags:

inventory

news

product design

twi

Inventory up, Japanese cars still rare - This Week in Supply Chain Management (27 / 2011)

Daniel Dumke — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 11:44:00 +0000

This week has been filled with work on my dissertation, I nearly finished my first chapter. But I have a long flight on Saturday, and so I have some time to fill.

News

Inventory levels at semiconductor suppliers seem to be rising, with memory components up by nearly 15% (iSuppli via Circuits Assembly)
Australians seem to love Japanese cars, since car sales in June fell over 10 percent due to the Japanese disruption. GM seems to be one of the winners with a market share of 13% in June (Reuters)
The Supply Chain Council just announced the agenda for their Executive Summit North America – Reinventing Supply Chain Strategy for Performance and Risk (SCC)

Blogs

Seeking Alpha takes a look at the monthly report by the ISM (Institute for Supply Management) and ponders about the implications for growth and investment (Seeking Alpha)
Mining Weekly has an interview on how to mitigate risks in Africa (Mining Weekly)
I did not know that they still existed, but Psion is still alive… and reports problems with its supply chain leading to a huge drop in the stock price. (Financial Times)
Risk management can be a competitive advantage, a study by Accenture finds (@Risk)

Research

The World Trade Magazine and the University of Tennessee conducted a survey on current supply chain trends. The results indicate that supply risk management is still in an quite early phase (WT 100)
Jan Husdal reviews a dissertation on the risk issues of low cost sourcing in Turkey and China (Jan Husdal)

If you haven’t read my articles of this week, have a look at the following:

Monday: I answered a simple question: What’s better, single sourcing or dual sourcing? It depends, of course!
Wednesday: This week I especially liked my discovery of Flipboard, an iPad application for reading online content I described here.

Enjoy your weekend, next week I’ll be posting from Bangkok.

Tags: