Humanitarian Supply Chain: An Agility Approach

Devendra K. Yadav1, Akhilesh Barve2

1
Research Scholar, 2Assistant Professor
School of Mechanical Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar
1
dky10@iitbbs.ac.in, 2akhilesh@iitbbs.ac.in
Bhubaneswar -751013, Odisha, India

Abstract- The purpose of humanitarian supply chain is to rapidly provide the appropriate
supplies to the people affected by disasters so as to minimize human suffering and death.
Humanitarian supply chain mostly undergoes due to poor strategic planning that leads to its
inability to deliver goods and relief aid during disasters. As a matter of fact, the disaster
happening cannot be avoided, but their consequences can be mitigated through a resilient
management of the humanitarian supply chain. The purpose of this research is to investigate
the nature of the humanitarian supply chain and to explore the way that will improve its
responsiveness through the application of traditional supply chain concepts. It makes an
interesting challenge for academicians and practitioners to know how such concepts can
contribute to enhance the relief aid in the time of need. Agility is one of the concept of traditional
supply chain that refers to the ability to thrive and prosper the unpredictable changes. This
ability could be applied to address the unstable nature of post disasters demand. In this context
this research addresses the various factors that promote to achieve agility and better relief
strategy to those made vulnerable.

Keywords: Humanitarian supply chain, Agility, Disaster relief

1. Introduction

Tsunami, cyclone, hurricane, earthquake, flood…every year there are about hundreds of
disasters killing and affecting millions of people. We just have a look at the recent disaster
Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, to realize the impact of such disaster where more than 10,
000 people have been killed. In the same year Odisha one of the state of India suffered due to
super cyclone Phailin that affected more than 5,00,000 people. Though it is not possible to
prevent natural disaster, yet the post disaster impact can be minimised through proper strategic
planning and well preparedness. When disasters occurs, humanitarian organisations respond
by delivering relief aid to people in need with the objective to provide humanitarian assistance in
the forms of food, water, medicine, shelter, and supplies to affected areas. These operations are
mostly impeded by the resulting logistical problems, difficulties in organising emergency
response (which affects decision-making and coordination), disaster-management policy
(mitigation, prevention and preparedness), and the social and economic environment of the
affected area. An over-abundance of financial resources (proliferation of responding actors,
marginalisation of local actors by international actors and assistance without a needs
assessment) and poor coordination (Thevenaz & Resodihardjo, 2010) also affect the relief
operations. In this context humanitarian supply chains must therefore be both fast and agile
(Van Wassenhove, 2006; Oloruntoba and Gray, 2006).

It has been advocated by several authors (Thomas and Kopczak, 2005; Davidson, 2006; Van
Wassenhove, 2006; Oloruntoba and Gray, 2006), that some supply chain concepts share
similarities to relief chains and therefore the tools and methods developed for supply chains can
also be adapted to relief chains. In this research paper, we adapted agile concept of traditional
supply chain considering the unique feature to disaster relief activities.

The following sections highlight the different aspect of agile concept for commercial supply
chain and humanitarian aid supply chain.

2. Theoretical background
2.1. Agile Commercial Supply Chain Management

The concept of agile supply chain means a continual readiness to change, sometimes to
change radically (Goldman et al., 1995) to rapidly respond to change in market and customer
demand (Jain et al. 2008). The term agility has been associated with various sectors like
manufacturing and business to take care of uncertainty in demand and unreliability in supply.
Because of the speed, flexibility, increased diversity and customization, agility can be employed
as a suitable strategy to manage risk in supply chains (Faisal et al. 2007). With the increase in
competition and companies, an agile supply chain is seen as a dominant competitive advantage
in today’s business as it relates to the interface between the company and the customer. There
are growing bodies of literature which covers different aspects of agility including evaluation of
agility in supply chain (Jain et al. 2008), an agile supply chain model for humanitarian aid
(Oloruntoba and Gray, 2006), framework for the development of agile supply chain (Ismail and
Sharifi, 2006), measurement of agile capabilities in the supply chain (Van Hoek et al. 2001),
implementation of agile supply chain in manufacturing industry (Kumar et al. 2011).
 2.2. Humanitarian Supply Chain

Simchi-levi(2005) specifies that Supply Chain Management(SCM) is “a set of approaches

utilized to efficiently integrate suppliers, warehouses, and stores, so that merchandise is
produced and distributed at the right quantities, to the right locations, and at the right time, in
order to minimize system wide costs while satisfying service level requirements”. If we exclude
some unsuitable terms such as “customer” or “store”, the concept of SCM explains what
humanitarian organisations, suppliers and donors should do to minimize the impact of crisis.
This concept, when applied to disaster relief, is called the Humanitarian Supply Chain (Charles,
A. 2010). Humanitarian supply chain is also recognized by the terms like disaster management,
emergency management, humanitarian logistics, and relief management. Therefore, literature
available on these keywords scanned to explain how a humanitarian supply chain could be
more agile. Humanitarian supply chain and humanitarian logistics are used interchangeably in
many studies (Howden, 2009). In fact, though the logistics are more focused on moving
something or someone from a point of origin to a destination, supply chain management mainly
focuses on relationships among the actors that make such movement possible (Cozzolino,
2012). The humanitarian supply chain is specialized in managing large scale risks (Balcik et al.,
2010), managing the relationship between disaster relief actors (Kovács and Spens, 2009),
performing needs assessment, evaluating the impact of distributed supplies (Howden, 2009),
and monitoring of various ongoing relief activities. The various links of humanitarian supply
chain is also shown in figure 1.

Government International International

Donor agency NGOs

Beneficiaries (aid Community based

recipients) organisations (local Local NGOs
partners)

Figure 1. Typical humanitarian supply chain (source: Oloruntoba and Gray, 2006)

2.3. Humanitarian Aid and Agility

When hazards intersect with the vulnerability of human society, they become devastating
disasters, causing considerable destruction, claiming countless casualties, and leading to
catastrophic consequences (Chen et al. 2011). To mitigate the losses from disaster,
humanitarian aid normally focus on the quick response aimed at search and rescue, sustaining
or saving life, and restoring self-sufficiency. Working on the clarification of what exactly enables
humanitarians to be reactive and effective would benefit both the private sector and
humanitarians. Indeed, many authors agree on the importance of agility (Charles, A. 2010). The
concept of agility is increasingly accepted as essential for the growth and survival of commercial
organisations in most business contexts (Ismail and Sharifi, 2006). Achieving agility is more
relevant to those organisations which need ‘physically effective and efficient’ supply chain
operating structures (Fisher, 1997), which suggests that its concepts are particularly applicable
to NGO supply chains. Having a logical, objective, robust and reproducible method for
assessing supply chain agility is therefore becoming of prime importance for both commercial
and humanitarian sectors.

3. Agile Humanitarian supply chain factors

3.1. Strategic planning

Disaster management is group of activities that drives the successful execution of relief efforts,
and it begins with strategic process design (Tomasini and Van Wassenhove, 2009). Strategic
planning phase refers to policies that can dissipate any potential benefits of significant
preparation. It includes need assessment, developing coordination plans, procurement and
transportation of relief materials, supplier selection strategy, and collaborations with other relief
agencies.

Strategic Planning Preparedness

AGILE HUMANITARIAN
AID

Capacity Building Infrastructure

Figure 2. Agile humanitarian supply chain factors

 3.2. Preparedness

Preparedness in the field of disaster management can best be defined as a state of readiness to
respond to a disaster, crisis, or any other type of emergency situation. Preparedness consists of
four basic elements: preparing a plan, acquiring equipment, training to the plan, and exercising
the plan (Haddow et al. 2011). It includes selection of supplier, selection of warehouses,
inventory management, mock drill, technical equipment purchasing, making announcements
etc. The response itself is the measure of the preparedness.

3.3. Capacity building

The two terms capacity development and capacity building are sometimes used interchangeably
(Hagelsteen and Becker, 2013). Capacity building activities like training, establishment of
institutions, community bases training, information and coordination sharing under the Disaster
Risk Reduction (DRR) programme helped in establishment of a more interactive partnership
between the different stakeholders involved in development and disaster mitigation related
activities of concerned area. To design a project for capacity development for disaster risk
reduction, it is important to first analyse and understand the local context (DAC, 2006), including
general political, social, cultural, economic, physical and environ- mental factors (Wisner et al.,
2004). The institutional capacity building must be done in a manner that it ensures sustainability
of the initiatives.

3.4. Infrastructure

Sudden-onset disasters have a strong negative impact on the physical infrastructure of the
region, destroying transport infrastructure such as bridges and airfields, electricity networks and
communication infrastructure (Kovács and Spen, 2009). Facility location, stock pre-positioning
decisions, and fleet management in a humanitarian relief chain responding to quick-onset
disasters. Facility location decisions affect the performance of relief operations, since the
number and locations of the distribution centre and the amount of relief supply stocks held
therein directly affect the response time and costs (Balcik and Beamon, 2008). Inadequate
infrastructure is identified as a major challenge of disaster relief activities and infrastructure
repair and construction of hospitals and shelters are treated as critical activities (Kovács and
Spen, 2009) of humanitarian supply chain.
 4. Conclusion and future Work

A successful humanitarian operation mitigates the urgent needs of a population with a

sustainable reduction of their vulnerability in the shortest amount of time and with the least
amount of resources’ (Tomasini and Van Wassenhove, 2004c). To satisfy the end customer
in humanitarian supply chain is a challenging task for logistician, but by eliminating the
weaker and missing link of this chain, the relief operation could be retrofitted in a positive
way. Identifying the risk possess by hazards and assessing the need of relief material is first
step of response phase, but how quickly we execute our plan during that phase is a matter
of concern. The concept of commercial supply chain like agility could be prove as new
paradigm in this arena. Such a tool would also provide supply chain managers with effective
ways of collaborating with other stakeholders, thus facilitating benchmarking and cross-
learning. Eventually, it would lead to better measurement of performance levels, improved
management skills and abilities, and increased facilitation of knowledge management, which
is not only a path toward self-improvement, but also a requirement for meeting donors’
expectations. The measurement of agility index and designing the agile humanitarian supply
chain are the future aspects of this study. Some other concepts of traditional supply chain
like lean, bullwhip effect, and supply chain integrity are also the future perspectives of this
research.

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