Matthieu Lauras

A model to define and assess the agility of supply chains: building on humanitarian experience

Purpose – By constantly working in environments with high degree of uncertainty, humanitarian organizations end up becoming specialists in the implementation of agile systems. Their counterparts in profit‐making organizations have a lot to learn from them in this domain. Volatility of demand, imbalance between supply and demand and disruptions are all factors that affect commercial supply chains and call for a high level of agility. The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to clearly define the concept of supply chain agility, and second, to build a model for assessing the level of agility of a supply chain.Design/methodology/approach – Three approaches are used in this research: literature review, case study and symbolic modeling.Findings – The paper developed first, a framework for defining supply chain agility and second, a model for assessing and improving the capabilities of humanitarian and commercial supply chains in terms of agility, based on an analysis of humanitarian approaches.Research limit...

An enterprise modelling approach for better optimisation modelling: application to the humanitarian relief chain coordination problem

Humanitarian supply chains (HSC) can be considered a new research area. The number of applied scientific publications has considerably increased over the past 15 years. About half of this research work uses quantitative techniques as optimisation decision-support systems. But due to the recentness of this academic area, researchers are finding it difficult to develop accurate, and above all, reliable mathematical models to support their steps towards improvement. This is particularly true concerning the crucial problems of coordination in HSCs. This paper tackles the issue by developing an original quantitative modelling support method. Based on enterprise modelling methodologies, we propose a business process modelling approach that helps in understanding, analysing, evaluating and then developing the formal expression of an HSC. Such a model, therefore, clearly has an added value for practitioners and should enable relevant quantitative models to be produced. Finally, an application on the emergency response processes of the International Federation of Red Cross is detailed in order to validate the relevance and the applicability of our proposal. This experiment allows all the variables and parameters that should be useful for improving the efficiency of the network to be identified.

The maturity of supply chain sustainability disclosure from a continuous improvement perspective

Purpose - – From a continuous improvement perspective, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the levels of maturity attained by organisations in reporting their supply chain (as well as non-supply chain) sustainability initiatives. It also investigates the extent to which supply chain sustainability (SCS) disclosure varies between different business sectors, as well as the degree of interconnection between various sustainability criteria. Subsequently, it proposes an improvement framework for reporting and implementing sustainability initiatives across the supply chain. Design/methodology/approach - – To carry out this investigation, corporate sustainability reports of selected companies in ten different industries are downloaded and assessed. The paper uses content analysis and principal component analysis to study the disclosure maturity levels of the different industrial sectors. Findings - – The papers results show that the disclosure maturity level is higher in business-to-consumer industries than in business-to-business industries on both the social and environmental dimensions. The paper also shows that the highly polluting energy sector is the least advanced in disclosing SCS initiatives. Generally speaking, there is no clear pattern in the way organisations disclose sustainability information. The conclusion is that sustainability disclosure is not yet homogeneously structured across different business sectors and organisations are yet to attain the “adult” maturity age. Originality/value - – Very few researchers can claim to have investigated the maturity levels of SCS disclosure from a continuous improvement perspective. This is probably due to the absence of a universally accepted framework that clearly defines the scope of sustainability. The paper tries to fill this gap by proposing a framework that would not only help researchers to study SCS and stakeholders to read sustainability reports, but would also enable practitioners to improve the quality and reliability of the data disclosed, especially as they apply to the supply chain.

Interoperability of Information Systems in Crisis Management: Crisis Modeling and Metamodeling

In a crisis situation (natural disaster, industrial accident, etc.) several partners have to act simultaneously to solve the emergency situation. Their coordination in such a context is a crucial point, especially in the first moments of the crisis. Their interoperability (precisely their Information Systems interoperability) is a major component of the success of the network. ISyCri17 French project propose to tackle this topic according to two aspects: (i) responsiveness of the network (its ability to act rapidly and efficiently) and (ii) flexibility of the obtained system of systems (its ability to evolve and follow the changing situation). This is so an agility problem of ISs of partners. This article presents the first results of this work: a metamodel of crisis situation and its ontological links with collaborative process design, and also the treatment of a first case of study, a NRBC18 exercise.

A road crisis management metamodel for an information decision support system

During the winter, snowfalls may occur, producing potential problems for traffic management. These road crises might be reduced setting up a collaborative network of heterogeneous actors aiming to solve this critical situation. Because crises deal with a lot of information, an Information Decision Support System might be deployed. Our point of view is to design it through a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). Thus, an unavoidable issue for designing such an IDSS concerns knowledge management. This paper aims at presenting and defining a Metamodel dealing with specific road crisis situations. This is the first result of the French project SIM-PeTra.

A Metamodel for Knowledge Management in Crisis Management

This article considers collaboration issue and data management issue as the key points of crisis management. In this context, the presented research works focus on a crisis management metamodel, dedicated to provide a way to class incoming data by connecting it to concepts of the metamodel. Such instances would then become intelligible for crisis management tools. This metamodel includes several points of view, specific to the domain of crisis management (including characteristics of the crisis, of the context, of the actors involved, etc.). Besides, the models built from this metamodel can be used as information bases for tools dedicated to support collaboration of actors: collaborative processes may be deduced from the models (and then orchestrated). Similarly, the evolution of the situation can be recorded as updates of the crisis models and contribute to the agility of the crisis management.

Towards a better management of complex emergencies through crisis management meta-modelling

Managing complex emergency situations is a challenging task, mainly due to the heterogeneity of the partners involved and the critical nature of such events. Whatever approach is adopted to support this objective, one unavoidable issue is knowledge management. In the context of our research project, gathering, formalising and exploiting all the knowledge and information about a given crisis situation is a critical requirement. This paper presents some research results concerning this specific topic: from a theoretical point of view, the generic dimensions of crisis characterisation are defined, while from a technical point of view, we describe a software solution able to collect that knowledge (based on meta-models and ontologies). This is used to confront the characteristics of the situation (context) with characteristics of the resources (relief system) in order to design a suitable response. Finally, an illustrative example concerning a crash between a tanker truck and a train is described.

A decision support system for optimising the order fulfilment process

Many authors have highlighted gaps at the interfaces between supply chains (SCs) and demand chains. Generally, the latter tends primarily to be ‘agile’ by maximising effectiveness and responsiveness while the former tends to be ‘lean’ by maximising efficiency. When, in the SC, disruptions (that lead to stock-out situations) occur after customer orders have been accepted, managers are faced with the problem of maximising customer satisfaction while taking into consideration the conflicting objectives of the supply and demand sides of the order fulfilment process. This article proposes a cross-functional multi-criteria decision-making (advanced available-to-promise) tool that provides different strategic options from which a solution can be chosen. It also proposes a performance measurement system to support the decision-making and improvement process. The results of some experimental tests show that the model enables to make strategic decisions on the degree of flexibility required to achieve the desired level of customer service.

A decision support system for robust humanitarian facility location

Each year, more than 400 natural disasters hit the world. To be more responsive, humanitarians organize stocks of relief items. It is an issue to know the quantity of items to be stored and where they should be positioned. Many authors have tried to address this issue both in industrial and humanitarian environments. However, humanitarian supply chains today do not perform correctly, particularly as regards resilience and efficiency. This is mainly due to the fact that when a disaster occurs, some hazards can strongly impact the network by destroying some resources or collapsing infrastructure. The expected performance of the relief response is consequently strongly decreased. The problem statement of our research work consists in proposing a decision-making support model in artificial intelligence dedicated to the humanitarian world and capable of designing a coherent network that is still able to adequately manage the response to a disaster despite failures or inadequacies of infrastructure and potential resources. This contribution is defined through a Stochastic Multi-Scenarios Program as a core and a set of extensions. A real-life application case based on the design of a humanitarian supply chain in Peru is developed in order to highlight the benefits and limits of the proposition.

A meta-ontology for knowledge acquisition and exploitation of collaborative social systems

Designing and/or managing collaborative social systems are obviously a complicated task, mainly due to the heterogeneity of the partners involved in terms of objectives, resources, information systems and so on. Whatever approach is adopted to support the collaboration (Mediation Information System, Peer-to-peer, Centralized Information System, etc.), one unavoidable issue is Knowledge Management. Gathering, formalizing and exploiting all the knowledge and information concerning a given collaborative situation is a critical requirement. In such a context, information and knowledge are widely distributed and the resources are classically not efficiently organized and utilized. A conceptualization is thus required to make the knowledge of the relations among the stakeholders explicit. This research work aims to provide a shared and common understanding of the management of collaboration, in order to be able to design and monitor future Decision-Making Support Tools and/or Collaborative Information Systems. Practically, the research works develops a generic meta-model and its ontology able to characterize a collaborative context and associated behaviors. All this knowledge is summarized through a Collaboration Meta-Ontology (CMO). Being in a formal format, the CMO provides partners with the means for acquiring, sharing and reasoning about collaborative information and knowledge. An illustration on the case of collaborative emergency management systems is developed.