HUMANITARIAN LOGISTICS OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT TO STRATEGIC ACTION

Humanitarian Logistics Operations Management to Strategic Action



Humanitarian Logistics Operations Management to Strategic Action

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to suggest consultant reporting to Senior Executives of the company. My job is to 'sell' my recommendation to Senior Executives and convince them of its merits. The advantages offered by applying the collective strategy model in the context of humanitarian logistics, enriching the existing benefits that operations management and business logistics techniques have brought to the field. In both man-made and natural disaster relief, humanitarian logistics operations have been hampered by a lack of coordination between actors, which directly affects performance in terms of reactivity and reliability. Adapted collective strategies could offer a solution to this problem. This paper wishes to examine the issue of humanitarian supply chains within a conceptual framework stressing the necessary coordination between supply chain members. Following a long period of disinterest, the scientific community is now studying the subject. A natural or man-made disaster means managing ephemeral supply chains in a great hurry while trying to adhere to performance objectives. Business logistics and humanitarian logistics have more in common than is usually imagined. To show reactivity with controlled costs (for financial resources from donors are not inexhaustible) is as much the business of organizations aiding stricken civilian populations as of manufacturers or large retailers embroiled in a merciless competitive war, even if the “weapons” used obviously remain specific.

Discussion

Humanitarian actions are a situation of crisis characterized by a necessary high level of reliability and adaptation to the victims' needs. Although individual organizations may have acquired an exemplary level of know-how through numerous past experiences, they still have difficulties in working quickly and together in the field. The increasing number of stakeholders (manufacturers, logistics service providers, governmental agencies, international organizations, etc.) poses a problem of coordination, considering that the different actors, often widely different in nature, size and specialization, are also compartmentalized in their operating modes. This coordination is a direct condition for successful aid. In order to improve the monitoring of humanitarian aid, actors will have to learn how to co-elaborate and co-manage relief chains. In other words, only a collective strategy will be able to improve the performance of humanitarian supply chains, while a lack of it has dramatic consequences for stricken populations. A case study, conducted on the Pisco earthquake in Peru (August 2007), complements the conceptual analysis and stresses the issues. An analysis of existing literature on humanitarian logistics and the results of the case study allow us to suggest the way in which a certain number of techniques borrowed from business logistics could be a key to improving the performance of humanitarian supply chains.

Humanitarian logistics, in the end, shows that the distinction between the “manufacturing perspective” and the “service perspective” is not necessarily relevant. In fact, humanitarian logistics is a combination of service and manufacturing, given that it exists to respond to an emergency at a given point in ...