Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2014
Every year, Emerald asks the editorial teams of several of its journals to nominate an Outstanding Paper and one or more Highly Commended Papers. This year’s winners have now been announced. These selections form part of the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2014. Awarded papers related to supply chain management are, for example, about logistics strategy and logistics integration (authors: Spillan et al.), supplier choice criteria (Voss), ocean shipping (Harrison and Fichtinger) and SME supply chain portfolios (Tokman et al.) [all published in IJLM], sustainability (Winter and Knemeyer), supply chain resilience (Wieland and Wallenburg), supply chain counterproductive work behaviors (Thornton et al.) and supply chain integration (Jin et al.) [IJPDLM], and pre-positioning commodities (Bemley et al.) and services operations management (Heaslip) [JHLSCM]. The winning articles are now freely available until the end of May, 2014. (See also: Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2013.)
The Story of a Fair Mouse
If you believe that today’s post is about little rodents that behave equitably, then you have most probably not heard about NagerIT’s project to build fair computer mice. (Although the German term “nager” translates literally as “rodent”.) NagerIT took supply chain transparency to an extreme, disclosing the entire supply chain of their Fair Mouse (pdf) on their website, thereby highlighting suppliers with unknown details on working conditions. The Fair Mouse project reveals how difficult it can be to produce a product that is 100% fair: NagerIT admit that they stay with “the problem of the mining of the metals (except solder tin) and the assembly of the remaining components, which [they] still can not obtain from alternative (fair) suppliers”. However, a good start has already been made. The story of the Fair Mouse is, of course, a little like the story of the Fairphone, recently presented here by its founder.
Ethical Supply Chain Management
Ethical supply chain management is among the most neglected areas of our field. One of the issues covered by ethical SCM are animal rights, which are not covered by social supply chain management, a closely related area. An interesting application of ethical SCM comes from KAT, the Association for Controlled Alternative Animal Husbandry, “the inspection body in Germany and neighbouring EU countries for the scrutiny of eggs from alternative forms of hen rearing (free-range, barn and organic rearing)”. The system helps to put visibility into the supply chain. According to KAT, “[v]irtually all eggs offered for sale on the German market in the food retail trade bear the KAT inspection label”. You can, for example, use the code 0-DE-1234567 to test the system and will then be able to see pictures of the farm and also a map. “What is on the egg?” has also been released as a free app for mobile phones.
Supply Chain Management Books
I recently conducted a survey with leading supply chain management researchers and asked them a simple question: “If you were teaching a doctoral seminar, what would you assign as the […] most important books for the academic field of SCM (‘must-reads’)?” The following six books were recommended most often: (1) Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning, and Operation by Sunil Chopra and Peter Meindl, (2) Logistics & Supply Chain Management by Martin Christopher, (3) Designing and Managing the Supply Chain: Concepts, Strategies and Case Studies by David Simchi-Levi, Philip Kaminsky and Edith Simchi-Levi, (4) Supply Chain Management: Design, Coordination and Operation by A. G. de Kok & Stephen C. Graves, (5) Purchasing & Supply Chain Management by Robert M. Monczka, Robert B. Handfield, Larry C. Giunipero and James L. Patterson, and (6) Foundations of Inventory Theory by Paul Zipkin. This list compares well with a list of the 10 Greatest Supply Chain Management Books of All Time identified based on Google Scholar.
