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This paper is based on a panel discussion at EurOMA 2015. The purpose of this paper is to identify a number of barriers to relevant research in humanitarian logistics. The authors propose a charter of ten rules for conducting relevant humanitarian research.

The authors use operations management literature to identify best practices for doing research with practice. The authors compile, condense and interpret opinions expressed by three academics and one practitioner at the panel discussion, and illustrate them through quotes.

The increasing volume of papers published in the humanitarian logistics literature has not led to a proportional impact on practice. The authors identify a number of reasons for this, such as poor problem definition, difficult access to data or lack of contextualization. The authors propose a charter of ten rules that have the potential to make humanitarian logistics research more relevant for practice.

By developing best practices for doing relevant research in humanitarian logistics, this paper enables the academic community and practice to better work together on relevant and impactful research projects. Academic knowledge combined with practice-inspired problems has the potential to generate significant improvements to humanitarian practice.

This paper is the first to address the problem of relevance of humanitarian logistics research. It is also one of the few papers involving a practitioner to discuss practical relevance of research. Through this unique approach, it is hoped that this paper provides a set of particularly helpful recommendations for researchers studying humanitarian logistics.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a more complete understanding of logistics preparedness. By comparing extant research in preparedness and logistics with findings from empirical analysis of secondary data, the authors develop a definition of and framework for logistics preparedness, along with suggestions for future research agenda.

The authors link the way in which humanitarian organizations define and aim to achieve logistics preparedness with extant academic research. The authors critically analyze public data from 13 organizations that are active in disaster relief and review papers on logistics preparedness and humanitarian logistics.

The authors found that, despite the increased attention, there is no unified understanding across organizations about what constitutes logistics preparedness and how it can contribute to improvements in operations. Based on the review of the academic literature, the authors found that the same is true for humanitarian logistics research. The lack of a common understanding has resulted in low visibility of efforts and lack of knowledge on logistics preparedness.

On the basis of extant research and practice, the authors suggest a definition of and framework for logistics preparedness with related suggestions for future studies.

Findings can help the humanitarian community gain a better understanding of their efforts related to developing logistics preparedness and can provide a better basis for communicating the need for, and results from, funding in preparedness.

Results can support improvements in humanitarian supply chains, thereby providing affected people with rapid, cost-efficient, and better-adapted responses.

The findings contribute to humanitarian logistics literature, first by identifying the issues related to the lack of a common definition. Second, the authors extend the understanding of what constitutes logistics preparedness by proposing an operationalized framework and definition. Finally, the authors add to the literature by discussing what future topics and types of research may be required.

This paper aims to provide a discussion on the interface and interactions between data, analytical techniques and impactful research in humanitarian health supply chains. New techniques for data capturing, processing and analytics, such as big data, blockchain technology and artificial intelligence, are increasingly put forward as potential “game changers” in the humanitarian field. Yet while they have potential to improve data analytics in the future, larger data sets and quantification per se are no “silver bullet” for complex and wicked problems in humanitarian health settings. Humanitarian health supply chains provide health care and medical aid to the most vulnerable in development and disaster relief settings alike. Unlike commercial supply chains, they often lack resources and long-term collaborations to enable learning from the past and to improve further.

Based on a combination of the authors’ research experience, interactions with practitioners throughout projects and academic literature, the authors consider the interface between data and analytical techniques and highlight some of the challenges inherent to humanitarian health settings. The authors apply a systems approach to represent the multiple factors and interactions between data, analytical techniques and collaboration in impactful research.

Based on this representation, the authors discuss relevant debates and suggest directions for future research to increase the impact of data analytics and collaborations in fostering sustainable solutions.

This study distinguishes itself and contributes by bringing the interface and interactions between data, analytical techniques and impactful research together in a systems approach, emphasizing the interconnectedness.

The purpose of this study is to show that the current complexity of humanitarian operations has only increased the usefulness of system dynamics (SD) in helping decision-makers better understand the challenges they face.

A critical analysis to evaluate how SD methodology has been applied to humanitarian operations.

Today's humanitarian operations are characterized by huge complexity given the increased number of stakeholders, feedback loops, uncertainty, scarce resources and multiple objectives. The authors argue that SD's tools (causal-loop diagram, data layer, simulation model) have the capacity to appropriately capture this complexity, thereby enhancing intuition and understanding.

Researchers and practitioners hesitate to use system dynamics when data is missing. The authors suggest alternatives to deal with this common situation.

This “impact pathways” paper argues that operations and supply chain management (OSCM) could help address the worsening drug shortage problem in high-income countries. This significant societal problem poses difficult challenges to stakeholders given the complex and dynamic nature of drug supply chains. OSCM scholars are well positioned to provide answers, introducing new research directions for OSCM in the process.

To substantiate this, the authors carried out a review of stakeholder reports from six European countries and the academic literature.

There is little academic research and no fundamental agreement among stakeholders about causes of shortages. Stakeholders have suggested many government measures, but little evidence exists on their comparative cost-effectiveness.

The authors discuss three pathways of impactful research on drug shortages to which OSCM could contribute: (1) Developing an evidence-based system view of drug shortages; (2) Studying the comparative cost-effectiveness of key government interventions; (3) Bringing supply chain risk management into the government and economics perspectives and vice versa. Our study provides a baseline for future COVID-19-related research on this topic.

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has developed a humanitarian supply management system (SUMA) that records, tracks and reports the flow of donations and purchased goods into a disaster area. While a lot of the received goods are in-kind donations, there is a procurement process triggered by the cash funds to meet specific needs. This procurement process also needs to comply with the humanitarian principles, and is therefore susceptible to manipulations from different stakeholders. SUMA has contributed to all the different deployments with the ability to build transparency and accountability in complex operations. These two contributions help to isolate the political factors from the supply chain and protect the humanitarian principles and space.

To meet the rising global needs, the humanitarian community has signed off on making a strategic change toward more localisation, which commonly refers to the empowerment of national and local actors in humanitarian assistance. However, to this date, actual initiatives for localisation are rare. To enhance understanding of the phenomenon, the authors explore localisation of logistics preparedness capacities and obstacles to its implementation. The authors particularly take the perspective of the international humanitarian organisation (IHO) community as they are expected to implement the localisation strategy.

A phenomenon-driven, exploratory and qualitative study was conducted. Data collection included in-depth interviews with 28 experienced humanitarian professionals.

The findings showed the ambiguity inherent in the localisation strategy with largely different views on four important dimensions. Particularly, the interviewees differ about strengthening external actors or internal national/local offices. The resulting framework visualises the gap between strategy formulation and implementation, which forms major obstacles to the localisation aims.

Further research is required to support the advancement of localisation of logistics preparedness capacities. Important aspects for future research include triangulation of results, other stakeholder perspectives and the influence of context.

The authors add to the important debate surrounding localisation by offering remedies to overcoming obstacles to strategy implementation. Further, the authors’ proposed framework offers a language to precisely describe the ways in which IHOs (should) view localisation of logistics preparedness capacities and its operationalisation.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first academic article on localisation within the humanitarian logistics context.

Due to the complexity of digital services, companies are increasingly forced to offer their services “in permanent beta”, requiring continuous fine-tuning and updating. Complexity makes it extremely difficult to predict when and where the next service disruption will occur. The authors examine what this means for performance measurement in digital service supply chains.

The authors use a mixed-method research design that combines a longitudinal case study of a European digital TV service provider and a system dynamics simulation analysis of that service provider's digital service supply chain.

With increased levels of complexity, traditional performance measurement methods, focused on detection of software bugs before release, become fragile or futile. The authors find that monitoring the performance of the service after release, with fast mitigation when service incidents are discovered, appears to be superior. This involves organizational change when traditional methods, like quality assurance, become less important.

The performance of digital services needs to be monitored by combining automated data collection about the status of the service with data interpretation using human expertise. Investing in human expertise is equally important as investing in automated processes.

The authors draw on unique empirical data collected from a digital service provider's struggle with performance measurement of its service over a period of nine years. The authors use simulations to show the impact of complexity on staff allocation.

Engage scholars and humanitarian organizations to collaborate on impactful problems.

A total of 20 years of experience working with Humanitarian Organizations and doing research in partnership with them.

A set of recommendations.

Knowledge sharing.