ranking

AMR announces Supply Chain Ranking 2010

Daniel Dumke — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:49:00 +0000

Gartner just announced the 2010 Supply Chain ranking conducted by AMR Research.
The ranking consists of the 25 companies with the best-ranked Supply Chains.

Ranking

This years Top 5 (extract):

Apple
Procter & Gamble
Cisco Systems
Wal-Mart Stores
Dell

Methodology

The following factors are included in the ranking and make up the overall score.

Peer Opinion / 154 voters (25%)
AMR Research Opinion / 27 voters (25%)
3-yr weighted ROA (25%)
Inventory Turns (15%)
3-yr weighted Revenue Growth (10%)

So there are three factor categories: subjective expert opinion, one supply chain number (inventory turns) and two primarily financial figures.

Methodology / Conclusion

There exists research supporting a correlation between supply chain performance and financial performance of a company, but up to now I have not found papers suggesting that the opposite is true as well. So I doubt that Revenue Growth and Weighted ROA are good indicators to appreciate supply chain performance.

Inventory turns on the other hand is probably very depend on the industry and product in focus and should be used with care.

The last factor is the expert opinion which contributes to the overall ranking. The expert ranking is split into the Peer Opinion and the AMR Research ranking. It is noteworthy, that the weights of both opinions are the same, even though there are five times more Peer Opinion experts than AMR experts indicating, that the AMR experts should be five times as knowledgeable than the other supply chain professionals.

From a business point of view the ranking show companies which have performed above average for a sustained period of time and their example could be used as a blueprint for Supply Chain Design.

Tags:

business

empirical

manager

news

ranking

supply chain management

survey

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

Rate This:

Tags:

Conferences 2010 in Numbers

Daniel Dumke — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:35:00 +0000

Overall there will be nine major conferences in 2010 with a Call for Papers. So I did a analysis of the topics mentioned there, I did not include general conference slogans.

On average every Call for Papers includes 17,7 topics, ranging from 11 (CSCMP Europe 2010) up to 32 (8th International Heinz Nixdorf Symposium).After aggregation of those 159 topics into 26 themes, it results in the following ranking.

The top 10 conference themes 2010
Theme	Percentage	Comment
Innovation in Supply Chain Management	11%	This is a major topic in several conferences e.g. HICL 2010
Strategy and Supply Chain Design	9%
Green and Sustainable SCs	8%
Supply Chain Risks	6%	Six of nine conferences relate to Supply Chain Risk Management (CSCMP EU, EurOMA, ISL do not include this topic)
IT and SCM	6%
Logistics	5%	Including internal and external, inbound and outbound logistics
Global Supply Chains	5%	Global Supply Chains and the effects of globalisation on SCM
SC Performance	4%
Procurement	4%
Human Ressources	4%	…and the impact of human behavior on SCM

I think it is noteworthy that topics concerning quality issues only account for 1% of the total topics, lean and inventory management approaches account for 2 respectively 1%.

Tags:

conference

ranking

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

Rate This:

Tags: