Disaster response supply chains are supply chains that must work under extreme conditions. In response to an emergency or humanitarian crisis, fully flexible supply chains are needed. In disaster response, military supply chains can play a major role side-by-side with humanitarian supply chains. Best results can be achieved where the extreme agility of rescue organizations can be matched with the extreme efficiency of the military.

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The major impact, if transportation stops in the UK is that the pubs will go out of beer. Big deal. Apparently, that is one of the “critical” sectors in the UK society and economy that will be hit a by transportation disruption, according to Alan McKinnon in his 2006 article, Life Without Trucks: The Impact of a Temporary Disruption of Road Freight Transport on a National Economy.  McKinnon argues that the logistics of manufacturing and distribution are now so finely tuned that any disruption can bring  an industry or even a whole region, let alone a whole country, to a halt in only a few days.

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This is the first time I have encountered the term turbulent environments in my research on supply chain risk. Peter Trkman and Kevin Mc Cormack use the terms turbulent and turbulence quite frequently in their 2009 article,  Supply chain risk in turbulent environments – A conceptual model for managing supply chain network risk. But is it really something new? After reading the article I’m left with the impression that they have just taken the words uncertain and uncertainty and replaced them with  turbulent and turbulence.

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This is the first paper that sparked my interest in transportation vulnerability and the focus of my research:  Risk and Impact of Natural Hazards on a Road Network by Erica Dalziell and Alan Nicholson, published in 2001, is one of the first attempts to calculate a cost benefit ratio for road closure versus mitigation investments. The worth of the mitigation will depend on its ability to reduce the probability and/or cost of road closure, and this paper shows how this can be done.

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Is Sheffi’s Resilient Enterprise the answer to supply chain risk? In 2005 Yossi Sheffi published the book The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage, where he lamented how unfortunate it is that many companies still leave risk management and business continuity to security professionals, business continuity planners or insurance professionals. Risk management needs to be a strategic management decision. But why?

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