Lightning Review: Supply Chain Security — International Practices and Innovations in Moving Goods Safely and Efficiently

SCS:IPIMGSE, edited by Andrew R. Thomas, teases excitement from from cover to back cover but never really delivers. Such are the perils of an unprotected supply chain.

This 2010 volume packages itself as a look at post-9/11 supply chains but gets mired in an analysis of post-post-9/11 bureaucracy mixed with diesel fuel prices. It’s somehow the chiral cousin of an ammonium nitrate / diesel U-Haul cocktail — beyond inert, smothering whatever interest the reader originally arrived with.

Analysis of the 9/11 era a decade later turns out to be a snapshot of the pre-COVID era from the same distance. The two events are incomparable in almost every sense but for how comfortable the eye of the storm between them now seems.

A major theme of the book seems to be tension between Maximal 80’s Just-In-Time supply chains and the types of resilient supply chains that might now seem necessary. They are, and always were, the same thing. Just-in-time doesn’t mean zero inventory. It means just-in-time even on a rainy day. Sorry if that was unclear to anybody.

Ultimately, the book is a semi-academic monograph that models the just-in-time ethos it cautions against. It is a series of interchangeable chapters that could have been acquired at the last minute. Like a bunch of standardised shipping containers, each seems interesting at the first couple of corrugations. It just looks like cardboard when you see them all together.

This post pairs well with “Stuck in the Middle With You” / Stealers Wheel / 1973