Tag Archives: humanitarian logistics

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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Book Review: Humanitarian Logistics

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Revised on: 2015-09-02

Summer break is over and time for a continuation of my blog posts. Humanitarian Logistics by Ronaldo Tomasini and Luk N van Wassenhove was suggested to me by a reader, following up on my post on the special issue of the Journal of Production Economics on the topic of Humanitarian Relief Supply Chains, so I thought I should read and review it here on my blog. The book starts out well and manages to highlight the importance of applying professional supply chain management in ad-hoc humanitarian supply chains, and ends up with a case example that advocates corporate social responsibility as one way into humanitarian supply chains. Not what I expected, but perhaps exactly what is needed to make humanitarian logistics work?

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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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Emergency Logistics

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Can commercial logistics’ ideas and solutions work in humanitarian supply chains? No. Why? Well, perhaps they could work, but in most cases they won’t, simply because there is a profound lack of technical logistics knowledge in many aid agencies and even more so, very few experienced logisticians working in the Humanitarian Aid community. That’s what Anthony Beresford and Stephen Pettit say in their 2009 article  Emergency logistics and risk mitigation in Thailand following the Asian tsunami. This scarcity of qualified logistics know-how impacts directly on the functioning of the relief effort. So they say…

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Humanitarian and military supply chains side-by side

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

The recent earthquakes in Samoa in the Pacific and in Padang in Indonesia are a poignant reminder for three chapters in my most recent book review, Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment by John Gattorna. In this book, the three chapters by Kim Winter and Michael Whiting and Kate Hughes point at why both military and humanitarian supply chains are needed for the overall best effective rescue effort. Only by combining the two, the strengths of both types of logistics can be exploited, where the extreme agility of rescue organizations can be matched with the extreme efficiency of the military.

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