Supply Chain Risk

Dec 14, 2011

Planning for Uncertainty in 2012

As I look back on 2011, I’m reminded of the success stories and disruptions that occurred, but am also thinking about who is going to win in the year ahead.…

Dec 6, 2011

Lenovo Relies on Agile Communications in a Disruptive Environment

One of the highlights of our SCRC meeting was a presentation by John Zapko, VP of Global Procurement at Lenovo. In his presentation to the group, John discussed some of…

Dec 5, 2011

Gaps In Relationships and Contracts in Eastern and Western Cultures

In this second post, I summarize additional insights that several of our speakers put forward at our recent SCRC meeting on Dec 1-2, 2011. We were lucky to have Tim…

Dec 5, 2011

Darwinism, Ignatius of Loyala, and SAP in Mongolia: Insights from the SCRC Meeting on Supply Chain Agility

The SCRC meeting on “Creating Agility in a Globally Volatile Environment” provided a broad variety of speakers who shared a number of different perspectives on the approaches that supply chain…

Sep 1, 2011

$30B of Waste in Iraq….We're not in TCE Anymore Oliver…

The Wartime Contracting Report came out today and announced $30B in waste in Iraq, and focused on the fact that there was a lot of graft and corruption taking place.…

Aug 17, 2011

Thinking about human supply chain intelligence

The value of supply chain intelligence coming from street level knowledge is a recurring theme that people are struggling to understand. The military is a good case study of how…

May 3, 2011

Jason Schenker's Economic Forecasts for the Year: "Dude, Where's My Gas?"

Jason Schenker of Prestige Economics had some great insights into some of the challenges that lie ahead for the US economy, which are listed below. 1. Growth is going up.…

Apr 22, 2011

The World Feels the Ripples from Japan's Tsunami

After the first shock of hearing about the loss of life in Japan, managers in companies such as Microsoft, Ford, Nintendo, and Komatsu around the world then begin to feel the global impact caused by this major event on their supply chains. Those impacts may last for many years to come.

Dec 2, 2010

Supply Chain Analytics: The New Frontier

Presentations by industry speakers and student teams at this year’s SCRC meeting on December 2 were once again outstanding. The topic this year, supply chain analytics, provided a wealth of…

Jul 4, 2010

The Critical Role of Procurement in the BP Oil Spill Cleanup: Part II

In a prior blog, I discussed the important role that procurement is playing at BP. Shortly after this event, I had a discussion with another group of executives involved in…