Backup or recovery?

In a previous post Will your business byte the dust? I described the importance of data backup. Nonetheless, even if you do back up your data, sometimes the data you need to access in case of a disaster hasn’t yet been backed up. Or a file is simply corrupted and cannot be read. Or it has been accidentally deleted. That’s when data recovery comes into play.

Wikipedia describes data recovery as:

the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally

However, as I said in my previous post Will your business byte the dust?

Before you splurge on whatever technology has to offer,  keep in mind that you need a tool that is in line with the value of the data to your business [...] it does not make sense to implement a solution that will allow a full recovery in days when you need hours or minutes.

One of the crucial factor in business continuity is the recovery time objective RTO that Wikipedia describes as

the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.

The The Definitive Handbook of Business Continuity Management offers considerable insights on this and other matters in business continuity management.

Hard Drive Repair

That said, what tools are available for hard drive recovery and how do you go about it? This PC World Article About DTI put me on the track to DIT, one of many companies that do Hard Drive Recovery.

As it happens, one of the most common failures in hard drives is so-called head failure or degradation, signified by clicking or any other strange sounds coming from the hard drive, and if the hard drive is  run too long in this degraded state it can make data unrecoverable at times. I didn’t know that, but in this case, hard drive repair is relatively easy.

DTI appears to be so sure of their recovery abilities in Hard Drive Repair that they offer a ‘no cure, no pay’ solution. ‘If we can’t fix it, we won’t charge you’. Admittedly, in the computer world, under normal circumstances, nothing is ever ‘deleted’, and can usually be fully or partially retrieved, given the right set of tools.

Need to know more?

I’m sure there are other places, too, but I found the resource center at dtidata.com a very helpful site in understanding hard drive failures and hard drive recovery techniques. You’d better be somewhat more technically inclined than I am to gain the full benefit from their writing, but there are some posts for the lay person like Restore Deleted Emails In Outlook Express or How To Remove Unwanted Software From Windows XP.

In addition, the DTI site also offers a selection of free data recovery software, even a floppy disk data recovery tool, for those still using such ‘antiquated’ data storage.

DTIData is only one of many specialists in hard drive recovery and hard drive repair, but it’s the company I happened to read about this weekend. If you have other preferences, please feel free to share them with me.

Links

• blogs.pcworld.com: Hard Drive Gone?
• dtidata.com: Hard Drive Recovery

Related

• husdal.com:
  Will your business byte the dust
• husdal.com:
  Book Review: The Definitive Handbook of Business Continuity Management

Seven key areas

The article divides the  supply chain domain into seven key areas where CEOs can exert a positive, or conversely, a negative influence:

Picking the right leaders – A CEO should never appoint  a person without the appropriate background for a senior position in supply chain management. Even if lateral job rotation is part of management training and the designated career path towards senior management positions, make sure that the supply chain management function is headed by someone who knows supply chain management.

Only a CEO who is up to date on supply-chain practices and trends can properly evaluate a supply-chain executive’s performance.

Initiating benchmarking and devising metrics –  A CEO ought to specify goals for improvement of inventory, transportation, and warehousing.  In order to do so he need to know benchmarking techniques and best practice metrics.

Ensure that any tool purporting to evaluate customer service assesses the company’s performance from the customer’s viewpoint.

Setting incentives for supportive behavior – A CEO ought to establish reward and incentive programmes to encourage employees to behave in ways that benefit the overall firm, not just their own functions.

Purchasing, logistics, and merchandising managers work in cross-functional teams and are measured — and rewarded — according to supply-chain metrics that assess purchasing costs, logistics costs of getting the product to the store, and the selling price in the store.

Keeping up with supply chain technologies and trends – A CEO should take the time to understand the sophisticated technologies that exist with supply chain management, among which RFID, machine readable codes  and bar codes.

A CEO who understands new technologies can play the important devil’s advocate role by challenging the business case for technology adoption.

Eliminating cross-functional crossed wires – A CEO should be aware of and avoid cross-functional sinkholes, where either part of the team has no understanding of the others’ role and function in the overall supply chain.

The CEO should thoroughly understand — so that he can help to harmonise — the interplay of cross-functional and supply chain priorities.

Adding supply chain insight to business planning – A CEO ought to make sure that no key information is missing from the planning stage. Supply-chain considerations should be core components of business planning, including sales and marketing promotions and of contract negotiations with customers and partners, because unforeseen disjunctions can undermine the best strategic intentions.

CEOs, if fully engaged, demand relevant business planning and negotiations anticipate and explicitly address important supply chain ramifications.

Resisting the tyranny of short-term thinking – A CEO should guard, in particular, against allowing quarterly pressures to dictate unprofitable long-term trends. Why? Because it results in

extreme costs and supply disruptions created by a quarterly cycle consisting of overcapacity and inventory build-up for two months, followed by rush production and delivery in the third month

Seven questions

These are the seven question a CEO should ask:

• Is supply chain leadership a valued career path in your company?
• Do you have a program of customer-focused metrics and best-practice benchmarking that drives cross-functional alignment?
• Do employee and customer behavior reflect your supply chain strategies?
• Do you understand important supply chain technology trends?
• Do you play a constructive role in resolving cross-functional disjunctions?
• Do you demand that supply chain expertise be factored into all or most business operations?
• Do you ensure that short-term thinking doesn’t sabotage supply chain strategies?

Conclusion

Although this article is more about suply chain management than supply chain risk, no supply chain is stronger than its weakest link, and weak links are a risk that can and should be avoided. This article is a step towards eliminating these weak links, at least the internal links.

A scorecard for self assessment

The answer to the seven questions  can be assesed using a scorecard:

(Click image for larger version)

Links

• Harvard Business  Review: Are you the weakest link in your company’s supply chain? (Login required)
• cio.co.nz: Are you  the weakest link in your company’s supply chain? (Full article, but no graphics)

Author links

• officemax.com: Reuben E Slone
• utk.edu: John T Mentzer
• dcvelocity.com: J Paul Dittmann

Related

husdal.com: Barcodes – essential to supply chain management?

Disasters: Prepare or React?

Today’s topic was centered around disasters and their impact:

To what extent can we really reduce the dangers from future disasters?

Does investing in prevention divert funds from rescue efforts when disasters do occur?

Why is it difficult to persuade governments and individuals to protect themselves against disasters?

What needs to be done to cut risk, and who should do it?

And with climate change do all these questions need an urgent answer?

The panel had widely diverging views, so this debate was indeed intense, swing from one end of the scale to the other.

The panelists

Todays’s panelists were:

• Arjun Katoch
  • Chief, UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination team
• Loren Legarda
  • Philippine Senator, possible presidential candidate and the UN champion of Disaster Risk Reduction in the Asia Pacific region.
• Guido Bertolaso
  • Head of Italy’s Civil Protection Agency.
• Edward Borodzicz
  • Professor of risk management at Portsmouth Business School. Author of Risk, Crisis and Security Management.

To mitigate risk or not to mitigate risk

The most interesting was how the panelists differed  in how to address risk, should risk be mitigated, or should be just accept it, and rather focus our efforts on preparing for dealing with the consequences. Basically this is being proactive versus being reactive. Should governments spend large sums of money on mitigation, on building up rescue and recovery capabilities, or should we rather tell people how can they can survive as long as possible if no rescue arrives, and in that manner reduce the impact. The basic message is that the government can only do so much, you have to do the rest yourself. On the other hand, the government must also provide the funds and opportunities, the legal and economical framework, for communities to prepare themselves. In essence, what the program ended with, was that there while there is a mood towards prepare, reality often leaves us only one choice: to react.

Missed the program?

Watch the show on the World Debate website (you may have to scroll down to find it):

• BBC World News: The World Debate

Links to the panelists

• Arjun Katoch
• Loren Legarda
• Guido Bertolaso
• Edward Borodzicz

Reactions

Most recently (2009/07/20) I found this reaction to the programme on rovinginsight.org, where Loreen Neville,  who works in a security company and is the Head of Investigations and who is also responsible for formulating security field operational procedures for clients, had this to say to the above questions:

Being mentally and physically prepared for natural disaster and man made disasters are necessary rather than to react. Pro-action rather than post-action. [...] Many governments focus too much on institutions for risk reduction research. [...] It is difficult to persuade governments and individuals to protect themselves against disaster because people tend to take disasters for granted. [...]

Read the full reaction here:

• rovinginsight.org: BBC World Debate Disasters: Prepare or React?

Related: Resilient organizations

New Zealand has long realized its exposure to hazards and disasters and in 2004 embarked on a six-year research project designed to assist organizations in recovering their economic competitiveness after hazard events:

• resorgs.org.nz: Resilient Organisations

Related: husdal.com

• husdal.com: Resilience revisited
• husdal.com: The six ways of dealing with risk
• husdal.com: Risk management: contingent versus mitigative
• husdal.com: How New Zealand prepares for disasters
• husdal.com: Risk visualization – can it really be that dangerous?

Disciplines don’t just happen, they are made

With the advent of today’s globalized and interconnected 24/7 business, and with supply chains stretched around the globe, endlessly pumping raw materials, finished goods, information and money from one end of the world to the other, supply chain management has emerged as an important discipline in business-related curricula. In the past, emerging disciplines have appeared when there were significant shifts in paradigm, enabling new perspectives to take the center stage. Such are paradigm shift is now needed in supply chain management.

Borrowing is a good thing

When I first saw the title tagline ‘Borrowing our way to a new discipline’, I thought the authors were ridiculing supply chain management for not having own thoughts, but stealing from other disciplines, and  creating a separate discipline by simply pouring old wine in new bottles. But that is not what the authors mean.  Although supply chain management may seem to lack a clear foundation in the Kuhnian sense, where for supply chain management to clearly exhibit disciplinary thinking, research should be

firmly based upon past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges  for some time as supplying the foundation for its further practice

that does mean that supply chain management is not an emerging discipline. Quite contrary, it clearly exhibits the hallmarks of an emerging discipline. But, in order to evolve further, and to root itself, supply chain management can and should embrace other fields, and not just the obviously related subjects.

Not a sum of smaller parts

Supply chain management uses a systems approach in much of its thinking, and as such, departs from the hard scientific disciplines, where the focus is no longer an analytical concentration on the parts, but a wider perspective on the whole:

A view of the supply chain from this perspective recognises that that we are not looking at a chain of entities but a web of relationships, and this view focuses not on optimising small portions of the web and assuming that the sum of optimised parts will represent the optimal whole. Instead, this perspective focuses on patterns that connect processes by which the web accomplishes the creation of value.

The creation of value seems to be a driving force in this article, but indeed, it is a driving force in supply chains.

Supply Chain Management is a verb, not a noun

So, supply chain management should be looking at expansive ways in which a greater interorganizational whole can be created and facilitated to creat enhanced customer value. This can only be done by adopting a liberal view of what comprises the new discipline:

This suggests moving away from viewing supply chain management as a ‘thing’, which serves immediately to restrict attention to those elements that have been defined into the term. Instead, we propose that supply chain management should be viewed as a verb. We can take this perspective if we view supply chain management as the orchestration of boundary-spanning intra-and interorganisational relationships withe the intention of enhancing the creation of value.

Strong and bold words.

Creative approaches

Thus, what supply chain management needs, are new approaches and approaches adapted from other disciplines, and Smith and Buddress list some 25 examples of other disciplines and realms with obvious and not so obvious linkages to supply chain flows, some of which are:

• Finance - Option theory
  • What are the strategies for quantifying an mitigating supply chain risk?
• Communications – Language
  • How does languaging and categorization affect supply chain management effectiveness?
• Psychology – Change in social systems
  • How does one promote movement toward and improved supply chain management?
• Biology – Epidemiology
  • How do problems and innovation spread in supply networks?
• Physics – Chaos theory
  • What are the limits of knowledge in supply chain management?
• Physics – Fluid mechanics
  • How do changes in volume of materials affect the challenges of managing those flows?

These are only some of the more interesting sources of knowledge from other disciplines and how they might be applied to supply chain management. This list is indeed wider, more expansive, and more creative than the list presented by James Stock in Applying theories from other disciplines to logistics.

Conclusion

This paper does show a new way to pursue research in supply chain management. Instead of cataloguing best practices  and fact finding (there are an array of case studies in supply chain management research), the focus should be on learned borrowing from other disciplines. It is only this way that it is possible to present thought-provoking paradigms and methods that can be found useful in supply chain management. The limit is the imagination of the researcher.

Giordano Bruno

Speaking of imagination, and being some sort of crossbreed-researcher myself, I am again reminded of Giordano Bruno, which I mentioned in my previous post on Broader research = better research:

Giordano Bruno was a philosopher who took the current ideas of his time and extrapolated them to new and original vistas. He claimed that all matter was intimately linked to all other matter, that we live in a universe in which all things are related. Nothing could be more true of the global supply chains of our days. Giordano Bruno is unique compared to the other martyrs of his time because of the power of his forward-thinking, where others were personal-thinking or contrary-thinking.

It is indeed time for supply chain management to be forward-thinking, and take in other perspectives, and today, 4 years after Supply chain management: borrowing our way to a discipline, I can tell that many new ideas are already in the mold.

Reference

Smith, M., & Buddress, L. (2005). Supply chain management: borrowing our way to a discipline International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 1 (4) DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2005.007495

Links

• wcu.edu: Michael E Smith
• pdx.edu: Leland Buddress

Related

• husdal.com: Broader research = better research?
• husdal.com: What kind of supplychainist are you?

Finding myself

It is actually quite interesting how I found this article. Remember my post on the Catch 22 of Academic Publishing? In that post I realized that the final value of academic publishing lies maybe not in the number of articles you publish, but in the number of publications that are actually cited. The higher the number of citations, the higher the level of utility. As it turns out, many of the articles on this site, which indeed are academical work,  but  are far from being academically published (as in academic journals), are nonetheless  widely used in the academic community, even to the point of being mistaken for my PhD. As I was following up on my post on the actual scholarliness Google Scholar, I decided to put Google Scholar to the test and search for myself to see what else that would turn up. That is how I came across the article for today’s post, where the author had used a very early (and I’m compelled to say ‘premature’) version of my thoughts on flexibility and robustness as one of their references.

Attempting to make sense of it all

The way the authors go about in their review is reminiscent of the approach in an article previously reviewed on this blog, namely Vanany, Zailani and Pujawan (2009) Supply chain risk management: literature review and future research, where the focus was on anything supply chain risk management, hence my title for today, reflecting on the very similar title for my review of Vanany et al, Supply chain risk management – a complete review? And do Babu & More (2008) deliver a complete review of anything supply chain flexibility?

The review of More & Babu

In their 34-page review the authors examine an impressive list of 107 articles and classify various aspects of supply chain flexibility. It is indeed a voluminous paper and not the easiest to keep oversight in,  and the authors do a formidable job in keepings things separate, I have to give them credit for that.  So, let me give you a short run-down off the essential findings:

Understanding supply chain flexibility

First,  More & Babu highlight some of the definitions and characteristics of (supply chain) flexibility used in their list of articles, before reverting to a definition of supply chain flexibility they themselves used in a previous conference presentation:

the inherent ability, or characteristics of the supply chain and its partners,

• to be sensitive to minor and major disturbances in the business environment,
• to correctly assess the actual situation,
• to quickly respond, adjust and adapt with little time, effort and cost, and
• to effectively control the organization, and
• to keep the performance stable.

While I agree that this definition encompasses most elements that need to be in place for a supply chain to be flexible, in my opinion it is not ‘crisp’ enough and it does not stand out vis-a-vis supply chain agility. However, the difference is clarified later in this paper, and I realize that the author use supply chain flexibility as an overarching or overlapping concept,that has much common ground with other concepts.

Types of supply chain flexibility

In defining ‘types’ of supply chain flexibility the author list no less than 71 different types, linking each type with the appropriate reference. I believe that some of these could and should be aggregated into other types, thus reducing the overall number, but it only goes to show that flexibility in one industry is different from flexibility in another industry.

Dimensions of supply chain flexibility

After describing the various types of supply chain flexibility, More & Babu propose three domains of dimensions for supply chain flexibility:

• core flexibility
• global flexibility
• supplemental flexibility

Core flexibility, obviously being the most important dimension, is described more in detail, the others more cursory. This is not a glitch, but only natural, since the other dimensions essentially are a result of  core flexibility, which relates to:

• Manufacturing
• Sourcing/Procurement/Purchasing
• Logistics Distribution
• Information and communication (ICT)
• Organization
• Human resources
• Market

Global flexibility is essential for achieving spatial and temporal flexibility and is seen as a response to environmental uncertainty. Although not clearly defined in the article, global flexibility encompasses all elements needed for stretching a supply chain around the globe, from supplier to end customer, particularly related to a network that can change time and space.

Supplemental flexibility appears as a rather foggy concept and I am not sure what the authors mean, but I guess it is anything else related to flexibility and not covered above. Or it could be flexibility that is not intended or designed or built in, but just happens to be there when needed?

Supply chain flexibility for business excellence

This section of the article deals with supply chain principles and how they relate to or are different from supply chain flexibility. I should add that while some of them are well described and well discussed, others are only given a more cursory review.

Supply chain flexibility – lean

While lean may work well in a predictable and non-volatile environment, flexible works better when faced with disruptive events.

Supply chain flexibility – agile

Agility is an extended concept of flexibility, and is achieved when the system is inherently flexible and able to repond to unpredictable events. A flexible system can be, but isn’t always agile; an agile system is always flexible.

Supply chain flexibility – responsive

Responsiveness is the ability to react  to customer demands or market changes. An inherently flexible system is able to respond; however, it is possible to be flexible, but not responsive, while responsiveness will always imply that there is an underlying flexible system. A flexible supply chain with time (to meet and satisfy the changes) as the primary constraint is a responsive supply chain.

Supply chain flexibility – resilient

Here the authors follow Sheffi in that more flexibility equals more resilience, thus enabling continuous reconstruction and the ability to bounce back after any disturbance.

Supply chain flexibility – robust

Interestingly, my own article on robustness and flexibility, which they reference, makes it into the ‘robust’ category. I’m not sure that’s where I would put it, but maybe yes. At that time (2004) my ideas on flexibility were still in the molding. However, as More & Babu see it, flexibility is an external concept, robustness is an internal concept, being flexible is to adapt and adjust, being robust is to accommodate and absorb. Faced with a disruption or external event, a robust supply chain will continue unchanged, while a flexible supply chain will continue changed. Robust is being risk averse and seeking certainty. Flexible is accepting uncertainty and and the risk that comes with it. I am not sure that is how I saw it in 2004, but looking back at my definitions of robust and flexible, yes, that interpretation is justified.

Forces and dynamics of supply chain flexibility

This is one of the more interesting parts of the paper, where they look at three (four) new terms: (domains and) stimuli, enablers and inhibitors, all contributing to how, or how not, supply chain flexibility can be achieved. The individual items pertaining to these terms make up an impressive list, which is very thorough, drawn from the reviewed literature.

Stimuli

Stimuli are the elements that compel the supply chain partners to take actions in response to a changing environment. Listing 16 domains (e.g. customer, competitor, technology, market, product, and 13 more…), the authors look at which stimuli that would bring forth supply chain flexibility. In technology, for instance, it could be rapid advances in technology, in product it could be shorter and shorter life cycle of products, and so on. Some 70 or so stimuli are listed.

Enablers

Enablers are tools and techniques that support the implementation or realization of supply chain flexibility. The authors divide the enablers according to six ’segments’ in the supply chain, starting with supply and procurement, and divided into sub-segments, and list some 150-200 enablers (I gave up counting).

Inhibitors

Inhibitors are internal and external forces that impede the supply chain. Here we have another ‘everything that comes to mind’ list, including no less than 62 inhibitors, ranging from market constraints to the more mundane ‘low morale’.

The dynamics of three forces

This is where the paper really lets me down, slightly. While the discussion itself is excellent, the figure that is supposed to illustrate the three concepts and the discussion leading up to it, is more or less completely void of any of the aforementioned, at least in the way it was presented. It is almost as if this is a completely different model, a good model, but not what I expected.

The verdict

The basic message I am reading out of this paper is that ‘It is all supply chain flexibility’, whatever we name it, whatever other concepts we bring in, it all comes down to one thing: being flexible. I am also impressed with the breadth of the paper. That is the upside.

If there is a downside to this paper it has to be the length and the attempt at being exhaustive to the point of including way too much detail. This leads to an overly lengthy listing of items, i.e. the discussion of stimuli, enablers and inhibitors, which would have fared much better had it been focused on a few aggregated items. While the stimuli, enablers and inhibitors are said to be drawn form the literature, no particular references are made to which is drawn from which literature.

I would also have liked to see the a model that actually incorporates the three forces.

While apparently geared towards manufacturing and operations, the wider scope of supply chain seems to be somewhat missing from the paper, e.g. I did not find the any of the seminal papers by Cooper, Lambert and Pagh in their reference list. Not that they should have been there, not really, but I usually expect at least one of those papers in a paper on supply chains.

Conclusion

That said, given the breadth and length, there IS much food for thought. And to answer the question stated in my title, yes, it is a complete review of supply chain flexibility as far as I am able to judge.

Reference

More, D., & Babu, A. (2008). Perspectives, practices and future of supply chain flexibility International Journal of Business Excellence, 1 (3) DOI: 10.1504/IJBEX.2008.017885

Links

• iitb.ac.in: A Subash Babu
• iitb.ac.in: Dileep More

Related

• husdal.com: De-confusing SCRM – robustness, resilience, flexibility and agility
• husdal.com: Robustness, Resilience and Flexibility in the supply chain
• husdal.com: Robustness and flexibility as options to reduce uncertainty