Supply Chain Risk Management (Entries tagged as case study)

Supply Chain Risk Management Dissertations (No. 1)

nospam@example.com (Daniel Stengel) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:37:00 +0200

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.de or 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
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Designing Supply Chain Strategies

nospam@example.com (Daniel Stengel) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:54:00 +0200

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

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Learning from the Military how to handle Disruptions

nospam@example.com (Daniel Stengel) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:45:00 +0200

Disruptions are a fact of life not only since the Supply Chain literature gained awareness of it. So some institutions in fact specialized on handling disruptions as their core competency.
The article "Responding to Disruptions in the Supply Network - from Dormant to Action" tries to transfer the knowledge and best practices present at the military and humanitarian organizations to Supply Chain Management.

Methodology
The authors (Kovács and Tatham) are using case research and a resource based view to find common patterns in military and humanitarian practices to efficiently and effectively act on disruptions.

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Perception of Supply Risk

nospam@example.com (Daniel Stengel) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 18:06:00 +0200

One of the most published supply risk researchers is George A. Zsidisin. In his 2003 article he describes the characteristics of inbound supply that affect the perception of risk.

Supply Risk
The author defines supply risk as

the potential occurrence of an incident associated with inbound supply from individual supplier failures or the supply market, in which its outcomes result in the inability of the purchasing firm to meet customer demand or cause threats to customer life and safety.

He therefore includes the probability and significance of an adverse event.

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Supply Chain Performance and its topological features

nospam@example.com (Daniel Stengel) — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 10:04:00 +0200

Perhaps this research by Pero et al. can support small and medium sized companies with the design and redesign of its supply chain network.
The goal of the study was to analyze the connection between topological features of the supply chain and the resulting supply chain performance.

Method and Model
The authors used simulation techniques and statistical analysis to simulate a pull based supply network. The network consists of a retailer-, distributor- and manufacturer-level.
Demand and lead times were random, the supply chain performance was measured with stock outs that occured.
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Research issues for managing supply chain disruptions

nospam@example.com (Daniel Stengel) — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:37:00 +0200

What do professionals in the domain of supply chain management think about disruptions? How do they prepare for them, how do they act when a disruption occurs?

Blackhurst et al. (2005) answer these questions in their work about "An empirically derived agenda of critical research issues for managing supply-chain disruptions".
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Uncertainty and Supply Chain Redesign

nospam@example.com (Daniel Stengel) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:17:00 +0200

A very interesting part of Supply Chain Risk Management deals with the impact of uncertainty on the supply chain design process. Van der Vorst and Beulens (2002) address this topic, and focus on the redesign of supply chains.

They claim that sources of uncertainty can be a key driver for chain redesign and after analyzing the literature and own research (case study) they present a tool for supply chain redesign where the sources of uncertainty support the selection of the relevant strategy.
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Acting on Supply Chain Disruptions

nospam@example.com (Daniel Stengel) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 09:43:33 +0200

Supply Chain Risk manifests itself in many ways. Today the German airlines restored their regular flight schedule again after six days of no or limited air traffic, after the latest eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull vulcano on Iceland.
The consequences of such events only rarely become evident, but in the background emergency plans have to be executed (or developed).

Case
10 years ago a disruption affected the supply chain at Ericsson, luckily the effects of this event on Ericsson have been published. Its about the so called "Albuquerque accident" in 2000, which was documented by Norrman and Jansson (2004).
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Modeling uncertain forecast accuracy in supply chains with postponement

nospam@example.com (Daniel Stengel) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:24:03 +0200

LeBlanc, Hill and Harder emphasis the uncertainty in forecast accuracy in their 2009 paper. And therefore address a huge gap in current SCRM research.

Model
In the model of LeBlanc et al. exist two uncertainties: Uncertainty over forecast accuracy and demand uncertainty.

Source: LeBlanc et al. (2009)

There are two decision points where the manager can decide if / how much he wants to produce: A and B. At time C the finished goods are shipped. Restrictions to the production quantity at A an B can be applied.

LeBlanc et al. address three questions with this model.

How much should the firm pay to improve the accuracy of the forecast?
How much should the firm pay to achieve strategic changes, such as reducing the cost of incurring each shortage or the cost of delaying procurement and production until time B?
For different forecast accuracies, shortage and holding costs, postponement add-on percentages, etc., what percentage of the forecast should a manufacturer postpone until time B, instead of producing at time A?

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Working Capital Management at Kraft

nospam@example.com (Daniel Stengel) — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:59:00 +0200

The CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly just published their first issue for 2010. One of the articles deals with the rising interest in reducing working capital using the example of Kraft Foods.
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