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Happy Holidays

Daniel Dumke — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 09:51:00 +0000

I wish you happy holidays and a good start in the new year and I hope you enjoy the spare time.
I am signing off for 2010, I’ll be back at January, 3rd. But I picked several noteworthy articles for you to read in the meantime.

The statistics show that my visitors especially loved the following articles, so if you have not read them have a look.

The following articles have been the least read, but perhaps you find an orange between all those lemons.

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Supply of Rare Earth Elements might be shrinking up to 72%

Daniel Dumke — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:02:00 +0000

Recently there were numerous discussions and speculations on the shrinking supply of rare earth elements.

Those elements are used in many different applications from hard disks over cars to iPods. Supply for the world demand is curently dominated by China, which delivers about 97 percent.

The BVL (German Logistics and Supply Chain Association) just published in their recent news letter that China is reducing their exports by 72 percent to only about 8000 tons for the second half of 2010.

According to different sources (reports by the EU an UN) the rebuilding of sourcing alternatives can take up to 15 years.

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Designing Supply Chain Strategies

Daniel Dumke — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 06:54:00 +0000

In his fourth video podcasts Professor Richard Wilding talks about Supply Chain Strategies. I found it quite interesting, so I would like to give you a short summary of it here. If you are interested you can just download the podcast for free, you find a link in the reference section.

Hierarchy

Strategies are usually broken down into smaller pieces so that every function within a company has its own individual goals. This leads to some kind of hierarchy like:

Corporate Strategy
Competitive Strategy
for each market segment, mostly driven by marketing
Supply Chain Strategy
derived from the competitive strategy, has to be developed together with marketing to secure alignment

Elements of Supply Chain Strategy

The four key elements every Supply Chain Strategy is built on are

Process Design
Supply Chain Network Design
Information Systems
Organizational Structure

Management within a company has to design each Supply Chain Strategy individually for the respective markets considering the above mentioned categories.

Wilding mentions the example of a beer brewery which engages in business in the Europe vs. Africa. The goals from the strategies might be very different, focussing on responsibility in Europe vs. affordability in Africa.

Let me know what you think about Supply Chain Strategies in the comment section below!

Reference:

Podcast of Professor Richard Wilding of the Cranfield School of Management

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Next Generation iPhone leaked

Daniel Dumke — Mon, 17 May 2010 18:30:00 +0000

Just a short note: Outsourcing always means giving away information which prior only belonged to one company. It therefore carries increased risk of theft, be it physical or intellectual.

In the last days several videos showed up on youtube showing what might be the next generation Apple iPhone.
Usually these videos are published from bloggers or the press, sometimes money for the device/video is paid.

But I would be worried much more about the pictures, that are not published… Presumably competitors like Sony-Ericsson, HTC, etc. might be willing to pay much more to get a hands-on glimpse on this device.

How can companies prevent this kind of risks? Is insourcing the only option?

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Supply Chain Conferences 2010

Daniel Dumke — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:04:00 +0000

Update: For all the conferences of 2012 please have a look at Supply Chain Conferences 2012

The new year has arrived. Time for contemplation and time for making plans for the new year.
Some things can and should be planned quite soon. One thing is the Logistics and Supply Chain conference schedule for the year 2010.

2010 Conferences (SCM, Logistics)
Name	Location	Start	End	Fee	Internet
FMI 2010 Supply Chain Conference	Phoenix, AZ, USA	31.01.2010	02.02.2010	USD 1’995	guest.cvent.com/EVENTS
CSCMP Europe 2010	Rotterdam, Netherlands	25.03.2010	26.03.2010	EUR 750	cscmp.org/events/europe-conference
8th International Heinz Nixdorf Symposium	Paderborn, Germany	21.04.2010	22.04.2010	EUR 300 (before March 31)	wwwhni.uni-paderborn.de
POMS 21st Annual Conference	Vancouver, Canada	07.05.2010	10.05.2010	USD 520 (before February 16)	www.pomsmeetings.org
19th Annual IPSERA Conference	Lappeenranta, Finland	16.05.2010	19.05.2010	EUR 495 (before January 30)	www.lut.fi/en/ipsera2010/
EurOMA 2010	Porto, Portugal	06.06.2010	09.06.2010	EUR 600 (before May 17)	www.euroma2010.org
SCLEurope	Prague, Czech Republic	07.06.2010	09.06.2010	GBP 1295	www.scleurope.com
NOFOMA Conference 2010	Kolding, Denmark	10.06.2010	11.06.2010	EUR 555 (before May 15)	www.nofoma.net
Supply Chain Management SIG 2010 Conference	Haifa, Israel	27.06.2010		tbd.	msom.technion.ac.il
15th International Symposium on Logistics (ISL 2010)	Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia	04.07.2010	07.07.2010	tbd.	www.isl21.net
Hamburg International Conference of Logistics	Hamburg, Germany	02.09.2010	03.09.2010	tbd.	www.hicl.org
CSCMP Annual Global Conference	San Diego, CA, USA	26.09.2010	29.09.2010	USD 1’640	cscmpconference.org
International Conference on Logistics Reseach (RIRL)	Bordeaux, France	30.09.2010	01.10.2010	tbd.	www.rirl.bem.edu

I have personally attended the HICL (Hamburg International Conference of Logistics) in 2009 and was impressed by the interesting tracks and presentations.

Now suppose you have limited resources (presumably time and/or money) so you are not able to attend all conferences. So how to decide on which conferences to go? Have you tried the PCAF formula yet?

Please enhance as needed. You can use the comments section for that.

EDIT: I am preparing a analysis of this years major topic trends. Updates soon.

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Fun with Science

Daniel Dumke — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 13:57:00 +0000

If you are like me working or even enjoying your holidays, here is some fun stuff for distraction.

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com
General scientific comic strips on xkcd.com

xkcd.com

And last but not least (but without a preview)
http://garfield.com/

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Journal Ranking - Supply Chain Risk Management

Daniel Dumke — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:29:00 +0000

The journals with relevant articles for Supply Chain Risk Management can be very diverse. First one would think about which fields and respective journals are relevant and where can one expect to find articles concerning supply chain risks?

The first thought is of course on Logistics and Supply Chain Management. There is one quite current article about journal ranking: Menachof et al. (2009): “An analysis of the value of supply chain management periodicals” published in the International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management. It is a study based on an survey with more than 100 responses to an online questionnaire.

A citation-based analysis was rejected mainly due to its incompleteness and the tendency to evaluate the impact of the periodical rather than the quality of the articles. Furthermore the authors suggest, that the perception of journals could be changing due to the increasing usage of online resources for publishing.

Overall 87 named papers were included within the survey (others could be named by the participants). Targets for the questions were educators at four-year colleges and universities. The feedback came mainly from anglo-saxon with feedback of only three german speaking countries.

Results were found in three categories: Use of periodicals in research, teaching and outreach.

Interesting is the fact, that more and more high value journals for SCM are from other fields like Marketing (eg. M. Christopher at Cranfield has done some research there) and OM/OR.

For me the research part is most interesting. There the JBL and IJPDLM rank highest in this survey.

The article also examines what search engines are used most for research (EBSCO Host BSP and ProQuest rank highest there), but this also brings me to further resources for journals and journal rankings, since there are further more.

One nice resource I stumbled upon was blog articles tagged eg. on wordpress.com. Other sites I found include:

http://www.journal-ranking.com/ranking/web/index.html

http://eigenfactor.org/

https://interorganisational.org/2008/08/27/scm-journal-ranking/

But these are all sources for SCM papers. Nothing what focusses on supply chain risk management.

So what other interesting sources for supply chain risks can there be? Eg. military research is one stream which is not mentioned in the article reviewed above.

The military is especially interested in defending the countries critical infrastructure, one part of it can be some supply chains. Of course there are different goals between military and businesses in the supply chain risk management view, but the methodology employed could be similar.

Reference:

Menachof, D., Gibson, B., Hanna, J., & Whiteing, A. (2009). An analysis of the value of supply chain management periodicals International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 39 (2), 145-165 DOI: 10.1108/09600030910942403

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Web Ressources on Supply Chain Management

Daniel Dumke — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:54:00 +0000

I finally received my credentials for the University Intranet so I am now able to start using some databases and get access to more articles online. But there are several other resources about Supply Chain Management online.

Kicking it of isn’t easy. So read what is hot or not at the interorganisational.org, which is a good start to get a first taste. So after some research now I had already found most of the articles in the SCRM section selected there. I missed some I liked very much, like “Perspectives in supply chain risk management” (Tang, 2006)

Just yesterday I stumbled up on husdal.com a great page about Supply Chain Vulnerability with literally hundreds of article reviews on related subjects. I also found one on “Risk in supply networks” (Harland, 2003), which summarizes the article exhaustively.

For the audiophiles I also found a podcast on Supply Chain Management from the Cranfield University. Cranfield is a postgrad-only University with one of the best teacher / student ratios in the UK. Beside the podcast there seem to be some interesting conferences organized at Cranfield.

Reference:

Tang, C. (2006). Perspectives in supply chain risk management☆ International Journal of Production Economics, 103 (2), 451-488 DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2005.12.006

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