Tag Archives: disaster recovery

Acts of God or Acts of Man?

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

Do we ever learn? How come we humans knowingly and willingly put ourselves and our critical infrastructure in harm’s way time and again? Instead of living with and adjusting to natural hazards, we turn them into natural disasters, by our own doings and short-sighted decisions. That is what Kerry Sieh wrote in 2000 in his article titled Acts of God, Acts of Man: How Humans Turn Natural Hazards into Natural Disasters. In his article, Kerry argues for a different approach to handling the natural hazards that Earth puts beneath our feet, and not just acquiesce to enduring the damage and death brought by natural disasters. Proper engineering is all it takes.

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Disaster Relief Supply Chains

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

While some aspects of commercial logistics and supply chain management are fully applicable for disaster relief and humanitarian supply chains many are not directly transferable. What are the similarities and what are the differences? Can both types of operations learn from each other? In this paper, Supply chain management for Disaster Relief Operations: principles and case studies, three scholars from Indonesia, Nyoman Pujawan, Nani Kurniati and Naning Wessiani propose a principle of supply chain management for Disaster Relief Operations based on visibility, coordination, professionalism and accountability, and then apply it as a framework to evaluate the handling of logistics operation of two recent events in Indonesia. What they come up with is indeed quite interesting.

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The impact of supply chain disasters

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Revised on: 2015-09-28

Disasters. The result: Damaged infrastructure. End result: Disrupted supply chains. But how do disasters really impact supply chains? What is the supply chain risk of disasters? While the damage done by windstorms and floods may be different from that of an earthquake, do they also impact supply chains differently, and does it even differ by industry or sector? Is it different upstream or downstream the supply chain? According to what Nesih Altay and Andres Ramirez wrote in their very recent article Impact of disasters on firms in different sectors: Implications for supply chains, the kind of disaster and the place a company has in the supply chain matters considerably. Interestingly, so they say, upstream partners enjoy a positive impact, while downstream partners have to plan for the opposite.

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Humanitarian Relief Supply Chains

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Revised on: 2011-07-06

Managing disaster supply chains has much in common with managing supply chain disruptions, and a disruption may not differ much from a disaster in both scope and scale. What are the key supply chain factors for improving disaster supply chain management? The International Journal of Production Economics is perhaps not the first journal you would look up in order to answer that question. Nonetheless, their latest special issue features no less than 13 articles on this particular subject, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars with a keen interest in the effective functioning of supply chains in the face of human disaster. As such ,this issue is an excellent introduction to an emerging field: the study of disaster supply chains. Some of the articles which have already been presented on this blog, and many more are to come.

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Humanitarian aid is better when decentralized

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

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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Call for papers: Humanitarian Logistics

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

With resilience as one the main themes for this blog, from time to time I have written posts on disaster management and humanitarian logistics. Now there is a new source for knowledge on these matters, the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management (JHLSCM). The journal is targeted at academics and practitioners in humanitarian public and private sector organizations working on all aspects of humanitarian logistics and supply chain management. Actually, the journal is not there yet, since the first issue is planned for 2011. However, the first call for papers has just been announced.

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Pyramidal thoughts

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Revised on: 2015-09-26

A promising title with promising content? Perhaps. If you are a supply chain or logistics professional, looking for a paper that discusses the intricacies of managing a supply chain in a disaster area, how to prepare and how to recover, this is NOT it. However, if you are a supply chain or logistics academic or researcher, looking for a new research strand or looking for a new theoretical approach to preparedness and recovery, then yes, this is it. The supply chain crisis and disaster pyramid by R. Glenn Richey Jr is a paper that falls in the category of academically intriguing, but practically maybe not so. That said, it may very well be a future seminal paper in supply chain disaster preparedness and recovery.

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Resilience Lessons from the Haiti Earthquake

Revised on: 2011-03-22

The recent earthquake in Haiti is a poignant reminder of how vulnerable a country is when it is facing disaster on a grand scale. To me, it is a reminder that that while natural disasters are not man-made, the aftermaths and consequences of the disasters often are. Disasters like this call for resilience in all parts of the community, including the infrastructure, the supply chains and society as a whole. Some of the older posts on this blog , and which do not see daylight too often may shed some light on this.

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Book Review: HBR on Crisis Management

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Close calls and near misses are not unusual in the business world, but how do companies deal with them? Published in 1999, the Harvard Business Review on Crisis Management is my third post on the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series, not that I intend to review all 73 of them. But this book reflects much of what is on my mind these days. I’ve had this book on my bookshelf for some time now, and I was planning on a review later this month, but the news on SAAB’s demise compelled me to move up my review in my posting schedule. The closure of SAAB is a major crisis by all standards, and is a fitting reminder that this 10-year old book will never go out of date. Why and how do some companies survive, and some not? This book sheds some light on this.

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Hard Drive Recovery and Business Continuity

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Having access to the most up-to-date business information is vital to any business. That is why you should back up your data regularly. Data backup and data recovery are major ingredients of any business continuity plan. Do you regularly back up vital business information? Not? Well, maybe hard drive recovery may save the day for you after all, should the worst thing happen: your hard drive crashes or is destroyed when you most need it. That is when hard drive repair may come to your rescue.

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BBC World Debate: Disasters – Prepare or React?

Revised on: 2015-09-11

Should we actually bother to spend time and money on disaster mitigation, or should we rather focus on preparing for disaster recovery? Is re-active better than pro-active? The BBC World News has an interesting program called the world debate, that puts the important questions to those in the spotlight, and usually this is not the most exciting program. It’s a panel discussion, where representatives from global politics, finance, business, the arts, media and other areas come together and discuss various matters. More often than not, for the few and selected, but not for the many, and not for me. This morning, however, the topics was disasters and risks, and instead of switching off, as I usually do, I kept watching, and I was taken aback by the diversity of the arguments.

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Resilience revisited

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Revised on: 2015-12-02

How many ways are there for defining vulnerability and criticality, really? Traditionally, risk matrixes have a likelihood/impact approach, but not always. Yesterday, I was examining a criticality/vulnerability matrix. Today, I will take a closer look at a criticality/preparedness matrix with a third susceptibility dimension added to it, as presented in the New Zealand research project Resilent Organisations, a project that has given me plenty of food for thought for my own research in assessing and analyzing resilience.

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Highway Vulnerability and Criticality Assessment

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Transportation vulnerability and resilience have been the focus of this blog for the past two days, first looking at Engineering Tranportation Lifelines and then Are roads more important than computers? Today I have a third article that relates to this subject: Assessing the vulnerability and criticality of the highway system. In 2002, AASHTO (the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) published a guideline on how to perform such an assessment, and I had almost forgotten about it, but it came back to me when I was researching my two previous posts. What makes this report worth posting about is the clear and distinct separation of the terms vulnerability and criticality.

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Are roads more important than computers?

Revised on: 2015-09-10

Critical Infrastructure. Which is more important – or ‘critical’ – road networks or computers? What if one day you could no longer use your computer or the Internet for one month, but you could still go anywhere by car? Or what if one day you could no longer go anywhere by car for one month, but you still had your computer or the Internet up and running, which would be worse? I would rather live without computers than without roads…

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Engineering transportation lifelines

Revised on: 2011-02-25

New Zealand is probably not the fist country that comes to mind when thinking of state-of-the-art transportation lifeline engineering. Nonetheless, I think it is time to consider New Zealand as being one of the countries at the very forefront. A 2008 research project, initiated by the New Zealand Transport Agency, provides a close look at how New Zealand practices lifelines engineering. The report is well-written, to the point and provides insight sand recommendations that are applicable not only to New Zealand, but to road and transport authorities anywhere.

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Risky Thinking

Revised on: 2011-03-11

This is a reciprocal gesture towards Michael Z. Bell, who is kind enough to list me in the blogroll on his Risky Thinking blog, as I just found out the other day. Michael is a Business Continuity consultant currently based in Ottawa, Canada, and his business website (and blog) presents current information and opinions on business continuity, disaster recovery, risk assessment, and business impact analysis. riskythinking.com contains many articles on Business Continuity and Risk Management. Obviously I cannot make a post on my blog about every website that lists me one way or the other, but this one of the more interesting websites I have seen lately.

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When disaster strikes…

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Revised on: 2011-03-10

…how does the transportation network recover? And why are transportation networks so essential to disaster recovery? Ho do effective transportation networks contribute to the recovery effort? Is recovery even possible without a functioning transportation network? This was the topic of a session I attended at TRB 2009 this week. Although this session was mainly aimed at US transportation agencies, the introduction to the panel discussion had some key points I would like to reiterate here.

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How New Zealand develops resilient organisations

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Is New Zealand better prepared for a disaster than other countries? As our infrastructure and organizations become ever more networked and interdependent there is a growing need to focus on managing overall system risk. In particular, there is a need to focus not only on the vulnerability of our systems to failure, but also on our ability to manage and minimize the impact of any failures. New Zealand has realized this and is currently halfway through a six year research project designed to assist organizations in recovering their economic competitiveness after hazard events.

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