SupplyChainTalk: Humanitarian supply chains

Supply Chain Talk host Duncan Brock was joined by Gyöngyi Kovács, Erkko Professor in Humanitarian Logistics, HUMLOG Institute, Hanken School of Economics, Finland; and Adam Whitfield, Quality Assurance & Audit Programme Manager, Achilles.

 

Views on news

Humanitarian supply chain management has a crucial role to play in alleviating human suffering in Ukraine. Humanitarian supply chains are unstable and subject to political and military influence.

 

The supply chain specialists must contend with inadequate logistics infrastructure, along with the origins of and destinations for relief supplies shifting without warning. Humanitarian supply chains mostly operate in conflict zones, which are likely to be the hardest hit by health crises too (50% of the least vaccinated countries are conflict zones).

 

Their tasks include refugee response, where the primary form of support is cash; support provided inside the warzone to internally displaced people, where you need staging points; and thirdly, operating food supply chains to get wheat and other cereals out of Ukraine to feed areas suffering from long periods of drought. Humanitarian supply chains need to be even more reactive, flexible and agile than commercial ones. Any previous training of staff in customs clearance, temperature control in war environments, etc pays huge dividends in these situations.

 

(One pound in preparedness equals the value of 7 pounds in response.) The first step to a humanitarian project is to understand what the country in crisis and its neighbours participating in the operation really need – getting items that have no value in that situation may cause unnecessary disruptions in the supply chain.

 

Therefore, needs assessment is key. Businesses’ and individuals’ initial urge to help is likely to subside months into a war or health crisis, which is due not only to fatigue but also the stabilisation of humanitarian supply chains with time.

 

Strategies of cost reduction and creating social value

Supply chains need to go beyond the second tier in terms of visibility to get more responsive and agile. Covid, for example, exposed plenty of bottlenecks, the existence of which businesses were completely unaware of before.

 

Lack of collaboration is also a major issue. In humanitarian supply chain planning different scenarios are examined based on the disasters that might hit the world, as well as the items that are typically missed in these environments. On a local level, climate and the plants growing under it, as well as the availability of drinking water and fuel need to be considered.

 

Panel’s advice

For good practice you need to look to UN agencies and big NGOs specialising in different sectors such as food and medical. Collaboration schemes when organisations come together and form clusters to work together also provide useful models.

 

The Humanitarian Logistics Association is a platform, for example, where supply chain practitioners can get together to share their experience. There are good examples in the private sector as well (H&M, Nike). But business can also learn a lot from humanitarian supply chains in terms of scale and speed.

 

Watch it on-demand here.