Category Archives: Popular science

Ig Nobel prize in transportation

Posted on November 3, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Nobel prize laureates are scarce in our discipline – the only fame to the claim being Oliver Williamson’s article in the  Journal of Supply Chain Management. But at least the Ig Nobel prizes have discovered the discipline. And the award goes to… Tero et al. (2010) for “Rules for biologically inspired adaptive network design” aka the use of slime mould for rail network design. Congrats to Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Dan P. Bebber, Mark D. Fricker, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi & Toshiyuki Nakagaki!

Gyöngyi

PS. The Ig Nobel prize in physics isn’t too bad from a Finnish perspective: it demonstrates that socks worn over shoes stop you slipping on ice :-)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Academic publications, Popular science, Scientific explanation, Socks and sandals

Meet the editors of IJPDLM

Posted on November 3, 2010 by | Leave a comment

If you cannot make it to a “meet the editors” event (e.g. at EUROMA but also at the next NordLog of NOFOMA), you can always look at podcasts of different journals. Here’s one with the new IJPDLM editors Alex Ellinger and Glenn Richey outlining their vision for the journal.

Gyöngyi

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Academic journals, Logistics, Popular science, Supply Chain Management

Research in social networks

Posted on October 7, 2010 by | 3 Comments

Some social networks have started out with a purpose to link professionals and track their links – now they are back to this purpose. Students have for a long time posted surveys on blogs but also facebook pages. Now researchers have come to embrace social networks to disseminate their output – which itself can take the form of classical articles (“fresh from the oven, who wants a copy”), books or, perhaps more suitable for this purpose, webinars. (Here is a book on “Humanitarian Logistics – a Career for Women“, spotted through the Linkedin WISE platform, and a webinar on “SMART service supply chains“.) Conferences have their own facebook sites (e.g. CSCMP) and even journals and groups of journals (e.g. the Elsevier transportation facebook page). More seriously, here is a link to a book on social network analysis methods, and ironically, a network for social network analysis. And why not, there are even social networks dedicated to research…

Gyöngyi

PS. The movie “the social network” should also be out by now.

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Academic publications, Humanitarian supply chains, Popular science, Service management, Socks and sandals

The impact of open access

Posted on September 22, 2010 by | 3 Comments

Who said open access journals were of worse quality? The broad disciplines of SCM research, social sciences and engineering might not have embraced “gold” open access (through the journal itself) but articles can often be found online anyway – see Björk et al. (2010). The impact is astonishing: not only are open access articles downloaded quicker and more frequently, but they are also cited more. When it comes to the article that published the research on the matter, it has already been downloaded over 6,000 times in the first three months of its publication, and quoted in Nature and Science, including a podcast. Furthermore, most interestingly, PLoS One, the open access journal it was published in, received an ISI impact factor of 4.3 after just 4 years of publication. If this isn’t dream impact, what is?

Gyöngyi

PS. Thanks to Bo-Christer Björk for this discussion over lunch.

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Academic publications, Journal ranking, Popular science

ERP implementation

Posted on April 6, 2010 by | Leave a comment

ERP systems have widely been discussed as a technological backbone to supply chain integration. Their benefits can be evaluated operationally but also in terms of impact on (customer) relationships, according to Su and Yang (2010). Just how are these systems (not) implemented? Here is a follow up on the ERP timeline, results from a short survey on ERP implementation strategies. Strategic impact may require an implementation strategy, after all.

Gyöngyi

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Popular science, Socks and sandals, Supply Chain Management

Visualising carbon footprints in the supply chain

Posted on January 12, 2010 by | Leave a comment

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 :-)

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Carbon management, Popular science, Socks and sandals, Supply Chain Management

Supply chain resilience and profitability

Posted on December 16, 2009 by | Leave a comment

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

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Popular science, Supply Chain Management

Tangible goods as distribution vehicles to provide a service

Posted on December 14, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Following up on Christian Grönroos’ clips on marketing of services, here is a series of interviews on “service dominant logic” (S-D-Logic) with Robert Lusch and Steve Vargo. To live with a quote from them, “we are all here to serve one another” after all. Yet, are “tangible goods really distribution vehicles” to provide a service?

Gyöngyi

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Popular science, Service management

Web 2.0 for research

Posted on October 6, 2009 by | Leave a comment

This is taking open source papers such as in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and discussions (in OM more known from JOM’s discussion forum) somewhat further: user-based “academic” content to discuss online; the launch of AcaWiki. Considering Wikipedia’s success (or failure) it will be interesting to see how they’ll deal with quality assurance beyond discussion entries.

Gyöngyi

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Popular science, Socks and sandals

Facility location in the middle of nowhere

Posted on September 29, 2009 by | 3 Comments

Facility location has fascinated geographers, logisticians, and ultimately, supply chain researchers for a long time. There are all the obvious push and pull factors, proximity to suppliers and markets, transportation rates etc. But what do you do if you have some sort of reason to locate a facility in the middle of nowhere (or a legacy of being located in the middle of nowhere)? Jan Husdal has now explored this question in terms of “sparse transportation networks”. Here it is. Delightful reading.

Gyöngyi

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Popular science, Socks and sandals, Transport geography