Monthly Archives: April 2007

Mission impossible: not becoming a service operations nerd or junkie

Posted on April 13, 2007 by | 2 Comments

Customer orientation sounds good.

Just as good as That Extra Half an Inch: Hair, Heels and Everything in Between. What are the last season shoes? What are the last season concepts?

What is customer orientation about? A company that takes care of its customers? A company that is able to provide customized products and services? Or would it be a company that asks the customer to perform some of its operations? Even free of charge?

Sometimes customers are invited to literally step into the shoes of operations managers.

Instead of calling the travel agency customers now book travel and acommodation on-line. As such, the customer becomes an active player in the order management cycle.

Recently, my alter ego booked a hotel room by e-mail and received the following…err..not confirmation, but request to perform some of the sellers quality operations:

“We confirm your accommodation booking….”

So far so good. Indeed, these five words were sufficient. They would have provided customer satisfaction if not this had followed…

“…Please check this Confirmation carefully to ensure that all details of this booking are correct…”

Interesting. Here the customer is asked to verify whether the seller has been able to receive the request by e-mail and enter it correctly into their booking systems.

Service operations nerd – at all four seasons?!

Árni

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Service management

The carbon-efficient supply chain

Posted on April 10, 2007 by | Leave a comment

Carbon emissions are “hip” – there is even a concert coming up on “live earth“. Not surprisingly, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published their report on the human factor in climate change. Now entire cities take up the issue of reducing carbon emissions – see Sydney’s “climate change blackout” and generally, Australia’s switch of light bulbs. (BTW, about regions, I wonder why the BBC decided to have a month of programmes on climate change that are just and only not to be broadcasted in the US. No wonder the ratification of the Kyoto protocol stops there… and the IPCC had to make some politically motivated last-minute changes to their report. Luckily the Supreme Court begs to differ on their opinion on climate change even from the US government.)

Anyway, a good start on energy consumption. But more than just carbon emissions, we’d also need to take a look at the products we produce and consume… So apart from UNEP‘s “vital graphics” on climate change, let’s not forget those on waste, product development etc. Has industry really “done enough” and it’s now “just” up to transportation to save the world?

So, products are dead… long live products! But why do products die? We’ve heard a lot about product life cycles – both the marketing, and the environmental management point of view – technology life cycles etc. Yet, we continue to produce non-durable products of over-durable materials (ie materials that do not naturally decompose).  What was it again about life cycle management and closed-loop supply chains? Low carbon economies need to look at the holistic picture of ecological footprints (individual and national ones) and “product miles“. Research as well as practice might want to follow the advice of the Economist: to look at coping strategies with climate change as well as make an effort to reverse such a change. Luckily, SCM research has discovered the importance of the matter; as a first step, MIT will have a CSCMP seminar on energy-efficient supply chains, and greening the supply chain remains trend #1 in SCM research – also in 2007.

Gyöngyi

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Carbon management, Sustainability

(Financial) service operations

Posted on April 10, 2007 by | Leave a comment

Service operation junkies and nerds unite! Here’s a CFP for the Journal of Service Research for articles on service operations! You can pour out all frustrations with the operational side of services on paper and submit it till Nov 1…

As a suggestion, a focus on financial services and payment flows might be interesting. SCM research loves to claim that it focuses on material, information and capital flows – has anyone ever seen a paper on the latter? (While it might be worth noting that one of the most cited articles of JSR is entitled “Strengthening the satisfaction-profit chain“.)

Gyöngyi

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Research & Methodology, Service management, Supply Chain Management

What follows doctoral courses?

Posted on April 7, 2007 by | 1 Comment

A number of universities in the Nordic countries have a history of joint effort in educating doctoral students.

Britta Gammelgaard explains the background of this in this article: The joint-Nordic PhD program in logistics (International Journalf of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 2001). The first course arranged was Logistics from a philosophy of science perspective in Tisvildeleje, Denmark, in January 1998. Two years later, Copenhagen Business School hosted the course Methods in logistics research. These courses did not only influence the work of the particpants on their dissertations but did also motivate further work within this area.

Stefan Holmberg wrote a paper on A Systems Perspective in Supply Chain Measurements, Dag Näslund worked on Logistics needs qualitative research – especially action research, and Karen Spens has together with Gyöngyi Kovács written several papers on topics that I am sure are influenced by various courses on these topics:
A content analysis of research approaches in logistics research and Abductive reasoning in logistics research . Jan Arlbjørn and Arni Halldorsson were inspired to write
Logistics knowledge creation: reflections on content, context and processes, and Arni Halldorsson and Jesper Aastrup have provided some thoughts on Quality criteria for qualitative inquiries in logistics.

Jan Arlbjørn co-authored (with Ebbi Gubi and John Johansen) Doctoral dissertations in logistics and supply chain management: A review of Scandinavian contributions from 1990 to 2001. Finally, Herbert Kotzab recently co-edited (with Stefan Seuring and Martin Müller) this reader on Research Methodologies in Supply Chain Management.

I must be forgetting some contributions and would be happy to add them to this list.

We are certainly influenced by a number factors that help us to push the envelope. Among these are doctoral courses that (ideally) provide the experimental setting necessary to articulate, discuss and synthesize some of the research problems we face during our research activities.

Árni

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Education & Management Development, Research & Methodology

A course in SCM for doctoral students

Posted on April 5, 2007 by | Leave a comment

Aalborg University is hosting a doctoral course in supply chain management November 5th-7th 2007.

Aim and content include:
- The purpose of this course is to give an introduction to the approaches that are used to explain the supply chain management phenomenon at doctoral research level.

- Supply chain management is touched upon at least in the following research areas: operations management, logistics, systems analysis, information systems management, industrial business networks and relationship marketing.

Árni

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Education & Management Development

Writer’s block

Posted on April 3, 2007 by | Leave a comment

What’s the implication of a writer’s block for SCM? You’d be surprised, this article makes the comparison between neurological networks (or neural networks, if you please) and business networks. And I thought the article on Amish furniture supply chains (or was it a cluster in the end?) was the funniest I had seen in a long time…

Here’s an excerpt from the writer’s block:

‘”Writer’s block” is the common term used to describe certain failures of the neurological network of the human brain . . . Of special concern . . . are the problems of bringing creativity to fruition in the completion or presentation of original work to a wider audience. This can be a daunting experience because of the onset of nerves, anxiety, time pressures and the anticipation of criticism from the person’s peer group or wider audience.’

Hoping none of the researchers currently at Ipsera feel it right now… But apart from the implications of a writer’s block for business networks (noting that truth drugs won’t help) , interestingly, the article distinguishes between different types of writer’s blocks, one being not the loss of writing skills, but the loss of the spark of originality. My special favourite is Malcolm Cunningham’s reflection #3 for academics and managers:

‘It has been pointed out that some creative writers, when going through the effects of writer’s block, tend to produce dull repetitive output . . . However, there is clear evidence that healthy academics also turn up at conferences with papers that are equally dull and repetitions of former papers.’

Let’s hope we bloggers won’t suffer from such a block… (though we might be able to buy one from Calvin – and Hobbes)

Gyöngyi

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Now: Ipsera 2007

Posted on April 3, 2007 by | Leave a comment

Ipsera 2007 is now being held in Bath, UK (you find the program here). The first day was closed by a conference drinks reception at the Roman Baths — a very beautiful setting!

The theme of the conference is Practice Makes Perfect — a theme which is discussed further by several keynote spekaers. Today, the conference opens by a plenary session on “Making Innovations Stick: Cases from Practice”.

IPSERA stands for International Purchasing and Supply Education and Research Association, and the annual conference gathers a number of academics and practitioners that present and discuss a variety of issues that relate to purchasing and supply management. Some of the papers presented at previous conferences have been published in the Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management.

Those who fancy the English novelist Jane Austen know that Bath and its surroundings are reflected in her novels.

Árni

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Conferences

Supply chain disaster management

Posted on April 1, 2007 by | 2 Comments

Supply chain risk management is entering a new era, that of disaster management. So what’s new? The current talk is about strategic risks with a natural (and occasionally, man-made) cause – see bird flu’s or BSE’s effects in the food supply chain, or climate-related risks. Even the BBC’s series on climate change will be looking at the 5 most overdue disasters, i.e. the “low probability disasters with a high probability of occurrence”. The question remains, which competing supply chain will be able to deal with it this time? Norrman and Jansson revisited…

Gyöngyi

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Humanitarian supply chains, Supply Chain Management