Good news, the International Journal of Logistics: Research and Applications (IJL:RA or IJoL, whichever abbreviation you prefer) has been accepted onto the Social Sciences Citation Index of the ISI. Its first impact factor should be published in June 2011. It’s just to hope that more SCM journals get included soon – a number of them are currently being evaluated.
The next question is of course what their impact factor would be, and how this will affect journal rankings, publication points you get for articles in different journals, the ABS ranking system…
Gyöngyi
Categories: Academic journals · Journal ranking · Logistics · Supply Chain Management
Following up on supply chain metaphors, here’s the same question but different answers. Here are some nice ones:
A supply chain is “a zipper, is something doesn’t go where it should, nothing works…” (Catja Laxén)
A supply chain is like “water running down a spider’s web: there is a complicated network of companies (hubs) and relationships between them (threads) and goods are flowing on the threads like water drops in a web. The water drops meet at some points and continue through the web, meeting other drops and growing, until it reaches the lower points of the web where in reality the end consumers would be.” (Isabell Mattsson)
Certainly enough, I asked for metaphors for “supply chain”, not “SCM” – any new suggestions for the latter?
Gyöngyi
PS Thanks for the contributions!
Categories: Socks and sandals · Supply Chain Management · supply chain
January 29, 2010 · 1 Comment
Categories: Logistics · Socks and sandals
Few groups see the benefit of social networks for research as clearly as the BDOM network (standing for behavioral dynamics in operations management). They haven’t just added a list of publications or a bibliography of relevant publications on their website but an archive (including classifications á la content analysis) of publications on google docs – hence one should be able to extend the list. Some (learning) models may be right 
Gyöngyi
PS. Here’s the link to Sterman’s (2002) article claiming that “all models are wrong“.
Categories: Operations management · Research & Methodology
Whilst the academic debate on how to calculate carbon footprints is a never-ending story and companies are still struggling to see where to reduce their CO2 emissions, there are at least some tools that help visualising the basic idea. Here’s the recipe: Take a product (or a food item), add its parts and raw materials, the location of these, the energy used to produce them, the transportation mode etc. and draw a map of your CO2 emissions. You can change each of the parameters (i.e. what if you suddenly produced a part with say, wind power instead of the general electric grid or what if the location of a supplier was different) and play with the results. You can even browse the maps of others. My favourites are a homemade bacon omelette and the typical laptop computer. What is yours?
Gyöngyi
PS Credits for the link to Niko Solitander and the Economic Geography mailing list. It takes a geographer to visualise a supply chain 
Categories: Carbon management · Popular science · Socks and sandals · Supply Chain Management
Finally, supply chain risk management is no more academic utopia or a mere consultant buzz word but is discussed in the boardroom. According to a survey by the Economics’ Intelligence Unit (which refers back to the Ericsson vs. Nokia comparison case as discussed years earlier by Norrman and Jansson), supply chain resilience can indeed be linked to profitability – especially during economic downturns. But also otherwise, the (perceived) magnitude of many supply chain disruptions is on the rise.
Gyöngyi
Categories: Popular science · Supply Chain Management
