Interorganisational - Supply Chain Management

The World Bank - and Lauri Ojala from the Turku School of Economics - have finally issued the full report on their assessment of the “logistics performance index” (LPI) of different countries. Nicely enough, not only the report but also, a lot of cross-country comparisons, rankings, and the original questionnaire can be accessed from the website. While the focus is on shippers perceptions and “logistics friendliness”, it also touches upon transport infrastructure assessments, with the aim to give donors an idea what to focus on.

Gyöngyi

Have you heard the phrase “down the supply chain” lately? Preferably at a SCM conference, against all common definitions of whatever is upstream and downstream? And no, it wasn’t someone in reverse logistics challenging the direction of upstream when looking at product returns, just someone who uses “down the supply chain” randomly to denote something happening at raw material suppliers…

While I agree with Árni on the danger of putting up academic silos (the good old “don’t step on my toes” way of thinking), there is also a danger of crossing the lines of disciplines, especially when terminology doesn’t just get confused but used with the completely opposite meaning to how it’s understood in mainstream literature. (Another lovely example would be “closing the loop” in industrial ecology vs. SCM…) But when it comes to SCM terminology, it might be our own fault. What are the core concepts of the disciplne after all? It’s not enough that we SCM scholars know about what up- vs. downstream would denote; rather, we’d need more research into each of our core concepts, concept maps, and a rigorous use of these concepts within the discipline at least. How are we to overcome academic silos without any clarity what we SCM academics are talking about?

Gyöngyi

Meteorologists are about 70% wrong when they predict the weather, yet everyone watches the weather forecast (btw, snow to come again this weekend in Helsinki). But how about spotting trends in SCM? (á la trainspotters, and lovely plane spotters who have been in the news when spotting illegal CIA transports of people via e.g. Warsaw to Guantánamo or when monitoring the use of Dash aircrafts after the ban by SAS…)

Few dare to make predictions about future events in SCM. While we may every now and then be trend spotters, looking at what’s hot and what’s not in SCM research, admittedly, even good Delphi studies are rather rare in this field. At the same time, future studies has become an established field, rapidly developing their methods. Not as if these were used in much detail, but MIT’s “supply chain 2020” now has a nice blog reflecting on current news and instantly analysing these in terms of scenarios for SCM. Watch out for the trends!

Gyöngyi

An interesting topic to enter the world of SCM is the issue of gender balance. LRN had several papers on the skills and capabilities of women vs. men, and the “male language” of logistics. There are interesting statistics to back up a lack of women in logistics (interestingly, some of the journal articles on this topic have been written by men). Recently, however, several research and also practitioner networks also got into this topic. Some offer mentoring to women in logistics, others actively want to address the gender imbalance in the field. Going beyond that, the point is to look at the specific reasons why women do not choose to work in this field versus what they could contribute to it that might in fact improve SCM. As an older version of Martha Cooper’s study on “career patterns of women in logistics” puts it, “women lead in style”

Gyöngyi