Why humanitarian logistics

Contact our training team for more information - training redr. RedR Australia offers a limited number of places on our courses to young Australians who aspire to a career in the humanitarian sector.

To be eligible for the Young Humanitarian Professionals rate you must:. The course focuses on the importance of logistics in the provision of aid to disaster survivors as well as its role in carrying out other disaster management operational activities.

It examines the design of logistics systems and the importance of coordination in carrying out logistics operations efficiently and effectively. Travel not included. Note that should COVID prevent your attendance, your registration can be moved to the next available course, or a full refund can be provided.

This paper aims to further the understanding of planning and carrying out logistics operations in disaster relief.

Creates a framework distinguishing between actors, phases, and logistical processes of disaster relief. Drawing parallels of humanitarian logistics and business logistics, the paper discovers and describes the unique characteristics of humanitarian logistics while recognizing the need of humanitarian logistics to learn from business logistics.

The paper is conceptual in nature; empirical research is needed to support the framework. The framework sets a research agenda for academics. Useful discussion of the unique characteristics of humanitarian logistics.

The framework provides practitioners with a tool for planning and carrying out humanitarian logistics operations. No overarching framework for humanitarian logistics exists in the logistics literature so far. The field of humanitarian logistics has so far received limited attention by logistics academics. To avoid such shortages, resources must be utilised as efficient as possible. Nevertheless, an anticipation of the exact demand is impossible; hence reaching total efficiency is excludable.

In order to be able to reduce the importance of an exact demand-anticipation successfully, organisations started to preposition resources. More precise, these resources are traceable in regions more prone to be affected by a natural or manmade catastrophe.

In general, disaster relief operations of humanitarian agencies follow the same procedure: At the beginning the focus is on establishing and optimizing the delivery process for the first urgent emergency care.

Subsequently, rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure to guarantee a sustainable supply becomes more important. Within the disaster-affected region, aid agencies need to be prepared for the worst: Bridges and air fields are potentially destroyed and hinder an adequate supply. Furthermore, a possibly damaged electricity network would have a negative impact on the communication infrastructure.

If the communication infrastructure does not allow a permanent transfer of information, route planning becomes very challenging for logisticians. As a last resort, humanitarian aid agencies can make use of aircrafts to airdrop supplies. Another issue in terms of infrastructure is the problem of the last mile. For instance, due to a destabilized infrastructure including limited power supplies, an appropriate temperature control for medicines can sometimes not be ensured.

A general belief in terms of efficiency and effectiveness is that companies, which apply performance measurement, outperform those that do not. Thus, measuring performance is crucial for an efficient and effective management of the humanitarian supply chain. The function of performance measurement lies in the quantification of the efficiency and effectiveness of an operation.

Therefore, specific indicators, such as capacity utilization, get determined. Although measuring the performance brings advantages such as a simplification of the communication between supply chain actors, many humanitarian aid agencies fail to implement convincing key figures.

For instance, an important part of humanitarian aid is to reduce suffering, but quantifying a relation between supply chain performance and alleviation of suffering is highly complex. In addition, logisticians have to deal with various critical elements that complicate the measurement of performance in humanitarian supply chains. Among others, humanitarian aid agencies operate in a chaotic environment with a limited information technology capacity and infrastructure.

Therefore, reliable data collection is problematic. Evidence, that a general lack of motivation to measure performance in the non-profit sector exists, is shown in research: Only 20 per cent of the humanitarian organisations measure performance consistently while 55 per cent do not monitor and report performance measurement indicators at all.

The remaining 25 per cent of the humanitarian aid agencies only use a few indicators. Regarding performance measurement, development potential is given. Humanitarian organisations need to increase their research efforts in this respect to ensure continuous performance-improvement in disaster relief operations.

One special characteristic of humanitarian logistics is the broad range of actors participating in disaster relief operations. Principally, actors involved are: governments, international and national donors, international and regional organisations, international and national non-governmental organisations, police and armed forces, logistics service providers and the local population.

In general, these different actors have the common goal to alleviate the suffering of vulnerable people. However, every actor has its own approach on how to reach this aim. Different approaches on how to reach a common goal, in turn, hamper humanitarian aid immense.

A major problem that hinders the achievement of a better cooperation between humanitarian aid agencies is the constant expansion within the humanitarian sector. The high number of humanitarian organisations either leads to a competition environment for scarce donor resources rather than it leads to a performance improvement.

As a solution for this dilemma, experts suggest a more collaborative approach in terms of emergency response.

Concerning shared equipment, assets or resources, collaboration among agencies improved in recent years, nevertheless, a lack of communication is still remaining. Often communication based problems arise before a disaster occurs since humanitarian organisations usually do not share information about available capabilities. As a result, they may be unwilling to share information that empowers others to their own potential detriment.

Beside an existing lack of cooperation, insufficient coordination due to the high number of actors is trigging the overall success of a disaster relief operation.

Estimations state, that The problem-solving approach regarding coordination lays in the development and expansion of collaborative information technology tools. However, a lack of considering the importance for supply chain management in disaster relief operations combined with the action-focused cultures of aid agencies hinder the development of information systems, information technology and logistics systems. Synchronisation of processes is very difficult due to discrepancies about appropriate processes among humanitarian agencies.

As a result, regular planning in disaster relief supply chains is frequently lacking. For instance, central data bases that include information about transit times, prices paid or quantities purchased and received, do often not exist.

In recent years constitutions, such as the United Nations Joint Logistics Centre, have realised the importance of information technology in emergency aid by providing a common information platform. This platform supports organisations in terms of gathering, collating, analysing and disseminating logistics information in the phase before a disaster occurs.

There is another indicator for a positive development concerning information technology systems in the humanitarian sector. Aid agencies started to create specialized common systems that contain information such as tracking and tracing. These systems are opened up for the use by other organisations. Humanitarian Logistics.

Which challenges do aid-agencies have to face in disaster relief operations and how can these operations be efficient? Stefan Lehrer Author. Add to cart. Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Humanitarian Logistics 3. Performance Measurement 4.