Humanitarian operations rely heavily on logistics in uncertain, risky, and urgent contexts, making them a very different field of application for supply chain management principles than that of traditional businesses. Decentralization, pre-positioning and pooling of relief items are key success factors for dramatic improvements in humanitarian operations  performance in disaster response and recovery. So say Aline Gatignon, Luk N van Wassenhove and Aurelie Charles in their newest article, The Yogyakarta earthquake: Humanitarian relief through IFRC’s decentralized supply chain. I believe they are right.

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