Relief Supply Chain Management for Disasters: Humanitarian Aid and Emergency Logistics

Citation

Fenton, G. and Altay, N. (2012), "Relief Supply Chain Management for Disasters: Humanitarian Aid and Emergency Logistics", Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 112-115. https://doi.org/10.1108/20426741211260769

A practitioner's perspective

This book is a collection of chapters that represent observations and case studies provided by a number of academics and researchers that have become involved, in recent years, in the field of humanitarian logistics. A variety of important topics are covered, from strategic partnering, supply chain planning, post disaster reconstruction operations, and value chain analysis, through to civil military coordination, “greening” supply chains and emergency logistics performance.

While the intended audience is predominantly academic, practitioners would definitely find this book useful. However, while aid sector and commercial sector supply chain management is considered to be technically similar, the hypothesis that in fact they are (particularly in terms of logistics) fundamentally different should be considered when reading this book. It must be recognised that further academic work is required to determine what research would be appropriate to confirm this.

Although aid and commercial sector supply chains show similarity, does this mean that business practices can or should be copied? What should an aid organisation do itself and what could be outsourced or done in partnership?

Relief Supply Chain Management for Disasters: Humanitarian Aid and Emergency Logistics is a comprehensive attempt to outline the numerous elements that must be taken into account when managing a humanitarian logistics operation. However, it is disappointing that there is not more practical discussion, for example, around how to better understand and strategically manage all the steps in a supply chain in the context of a complex and dispersed aid organisation. This would be particularly relevant from the perspective of aid organisation executives, who largely still undervalue logistics as a strategically important function. Without such understanding it's difficult to determine what can be adapted from commercial or military supply chains and what can realistically be outsourced. There is also a need to be clear what should not be outsourced and therefore what partnerships are operationally feasible. Aid organisations must be more structured and scientific about their approach or they may regret what they end up doing. Furthermore, they need to be clear at what stage in the disaster cycle they should consider outsourcing or partnering. What do organisations need when? Academics should be careful about making comparisons.

As there is a challenge in getting aid organisation executives to better value supply‐chain management, and although this book makes some valuable arguments, will it be referenced by senior decision makers in the Aid world? I fear not – but perhaps a concise summary can be published with such people in mind; namely, a short paper that is appropriately targeted. Executives sadly don’t have time to wade through 200 pages of highly referenced text. They need just the highlights in order to guide a change in attitude and behaviour. They must understand that there needs to be more investment in capacity building and training of supply chain management and logistics personnel. Concise information and data would be helpful to ensure more effective communication. The network of humanitarian logistics practitioners and academics should undertake a joint mapping of supply chains used in the aid sector and take note that these are highly fragmented and do not conform to norms in the ways of commercial operations. Also clearer parameters are needed to distinguish between different sized companies and aid organisations.

More case studies are needed, so mapping and understanding differing scenarios would help to identify trends. Working through partners does not only mean working through NGOs, it can also mean working through banks and other businesses. This can be illustrated with different agency profiles and initiatives at a global level.

It would have been helpful if the book had provided more focus on what is realistic next. Trying to get organisations from different cultural backgrounds to match capabilities is challenging, as Peter Tatham points out in his chapter on “Developing and maintaining trust in hastily formed relief networks”. Indeed there is still suspicion on the part of many aid organisations of working with private companies – an argument of how to best tackle that problem would have been helpful, although the use of the “Swift Trust Model” is potentially useful in this regard. Probably the issue of trust is one of the greatest limitations to aid v. private sector partnerships or broader inter‐organisational collaboration.

The book identifies a number of important barriers to the “greening” of relief supply chains. A new driver is the environment but it is difficult to gain traction within aid agencies on environmental impact. It could be argued that, given that there is a lack of understanding of the importance of effective supply chain management among senior aid sector managers, the issue of environmental controls is missed. Many such managers do not receive any training on logistics or supply chain management, which perhaps exacerbates the problem. A huge amount of training in this area is clearly needed in order to plug the many gaps in knowledge – particularly at field level. Training is frequently discussed at conferences but there doesn’t seem to be much progress in establishing collaborative training activities. The most successful programme to date was launched by Fritz Institute and CILT (UK) and the logistics cluster has developed some useful on‐line training tools. We should recognise that there is a cost associated with training, which is now more than ever a serious challenge. Academics could better support the need for training if they themselves were better coordinated – particularly in the sphere of humanitarian logistics research and hence identification of needs. Relief Supply Chain Management for Disasters: Humanitarian Aid and Emergency Logistics is therefore a step in the right direction. Supply chain management is about how you manage the whole process not the individual elements – which is logistics.

At different levels in organisations good communications is very important to improve the network approach in this area. Something similar happened in the commercial sector ten years ago (and is still going on). At that time senior managers underrated supply chain management; they didn’t understand that it's vital to better manage fragmented supply chains. Now larger companies have someone on the board that is appropriately responsible. They then make the budgets available for training.

This type of evolution needs to happen in aid organisations and this will take time. We can draw parallels with commercial companies. We should therefore be doing more research, marketing and selling about real life delivery. Communicating achievements and challenges is something that the humanitarian logistics sector is not currently good at. Indeed are we only talking about humanitarian organisations? The line between disaster response and development work is being blurred; as well as between preparedness and mitigation activities. Agencies need to find ways to reduce duplication of effort, particularly given the current global financial crisis. The traditional flow of donor funds is drying up. The possibility of diminishing funds should be the driving force for agencies to improve their supply chains. Relief Supply Chain Management for Disasters: Humanitarian Aid and Emergency Logistics is a valuable set of information to help bolster the case for change.

George Fenton

Supply Chain Director, Humanitarian Operations, World Vision International, Chairman, Humanitarian Logistics Association

An academic perspective

Within the last decade the world has experienced horrific disasters claiming the lives of thousands, destroying cities and shaking economies. Unfortunately, there is compelling evidence that the events of the last decade were not simply statistical outliers but, on the contrary, are part of an upward trend. Our world is experiencing natural disasters more frequently and severely. Vulnerabilities are quickly shifting from rural areas to coastal and high‐density urban regions. These changes also mean that humanitarians need to rethink the way they deliver aid to people in need. As more people are affected by disasters more frequently around the world, so too does aid need to be distributed more efficiently and effectively. Consequently, emergency aid logistics and management of relief supply chains now draw more attention from academics and field practitioners than ever before.

Relief Supply Chain Management for Disasters is the latest addition to the rapidly growing compendium on relief supply chains management and humanitarian logistics. Unlike previous books on the subject (by Tomasini and Van Wassenhove, and Christopher and Tatham), which primarily focused on the logistics of relief, this one takes a more comprehensive approach by examining the entire supply chain. In so doing, the book moves from partnerships (Chapters 1 and 2) to supply chain strategy and design (Chapters 3 through 6). Chapter 10 discusses developing and maintaining trust in relief supply chains, further emphasising the importance of supply chain relationships and design. Chapters 8 and 9 shed light on the challenges of a particular partnership, namely the involvement of military and civil‐military coordination. Chapters 7 and 11 touch on two increasingly popular challenges in humanitarian relief, local sourcing and environmentally friendly (green) relief supply chains, respectively. The last chapter of the book investigates the correlation between a country's logistics infrastructure and disaster impact.

According to the editors, this project was a by‐product of a doctoral seminar on Supply‐chain management for disaster relief, delivered at Hanken School of Economics in Finland. Although a call for chapters was issued to invite other interested researchers to contribute to the volume, most of the chapters were written either by the students in the course or by the core and contributing faculty. Nevertheless, the editors used a peer review to ensure that the rigour and quality of research in each chapter is consistent and comparable to a journal article.

This book has several strong points. First, its collection of chapters is both cohesive and compelling in content. The volume is expertly assembled and coherently showcases strategic and tactical concepts of relief supply chains. That said, the last chapter emerges without a strong connection to the overall objective of the book. Second, it aims to objectively shed light on issues of civil‐military cooperation. While not everyone in the humanitarian world welcomes military involvement in relief, it is undeniable that militaries are logistics experts. Third, each chapter contains persuasive suggestions for future research, which is the ideal goal of a reference book such as this one. And lastly, the distinguished reputation of the contributors and editors of the book. Professors Kovács and Spens are respected researchers in the field of humanitarian logistics and routinely collaborate with field practitioners. Additionally, as co‐editors of the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management they stay abreast of the latest research in this area.

As for the book's weaknesses there are a couple of points worth mentioning: with seven chapters dedicated to relief supply chain management and three related to civil‐military coordination, the book teases your appetite for more leading research questions and challenges in humanitarian supply chains. So it comes as a disappointment that there is only one chapter dedicated to increasingly popular topics such as local sourcing (Chapter 7) and environmentally friendly relief supply chains (Chapter 11). In addition, the book could have devoted at least a chapter to another key topic in the dialogue on humanitarian logistics: the design of relief supply chains for urban disasters. Hence, it almost feels like that the book needed at least two or three more chapters.

All these elements considered, Relief Supply Chain Management for Disasters is an excellent reference book that can be a primer for aspiring humanitarian researchers, a refreshing reference source for experienced ones, and an elaborate learning tool for field practitioners who seek to reflect on their daily challenges.

Nezih Altay

Department of Management, DePaul University, Chicago, USA