Supporting collaboration in humanitarian supply chains – insights from a design science project

Abstract

The growing number of large-scale relief operations and humanitarian aid initiatives is stretching the resources – financial, material and human – of humanitarian actors to their limits. Challenges to collaborate both within international humanitarian organizations, and among their direct and indirect supply chain partners often contribute to the inefficient use of resources, or ineffective operations. In this research, we discuss collaboration in humanitarian supply chains, and analyze causes of their dysfunctional operations. Furthermore, we develop an experiential learning approach that can sensitize humanitarian supply chain actors to causes of information distortion. The simulation approach was implemented in the field and instructional design cycles yielded insights into how staff apply their learnings under the specific conditions of humanitarian relief work.

Keywords:

• Humanitarian operations
• humanitarian supply chain
• collaboration
• experiential learning
• design science
• high energy biscuit (HEB) game

Acknowledgements

We would like thank all training participants from various IHOs and academia for their approachability. We are also grateful to the special issue guest editors and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier versions that helped us to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interests was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The description of Typhoon Haiyan was compiled from sources OCHA (2013), CRED (2014), COA (2014) and Stumpf, Wee, and Liwag (2014).

2 The data from the International Disaster Database and Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (accessible via http://www.emdat.be) can be broken down by region and type of event. A number of reports indicate that both impact and frequency of especially hydro-meteorological disasters are on the rise. Less developed countries suffer more severe long-term consequences. See CRED (2014) for a detailed report on the Typhoon Haiyan in the context of the high recurrence rate of tropical storms in Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines.

3 See http://www.hlcertification.org/mod/page/view.php?id=27 which tallied 426 graduates as of 31 May 2013.

4 We asked five raters to assign each of the 11 identified root causes of dysfunctional operations in humanitarian supply chains to the tree types. We calculated the Kappa-like statistic proposed by Davies and Fleiss (1982) across the assignments by the five raters and receive a value of 0.67, which is considered good agreement. This validates the grouping of the causes.

4 Our training kicks off with a hands-up survey of personal preferences: 1-Doing the relief work and working with the beneficiaries, 2-Planning the program, or 3-Reporting back on program results. Over 80% always declare a preference for 1 and express an almost moral aversion to 2 and 3.

6 In fact, when this article was published, the HEB game has been used many times by others than the research team and became an integral part of educational program offerings for humanitarian organizations.

Additional information

Funding

We would like to thank the Kühne Foundation for the financial support and collaboration in training execution.

Notes on contributors

Stephan M. Wagner

Stephan M. Wagner is a Professor and holds the Kühne Foundation-sponsored Chair of Logistics Management at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). His research interests lie in the areas of supply chain management, purchasing and supply management, logistics and transportation management – with a particular emphasis on strategy, networks, relationships, behavioral issues, risk, innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability. His research in these areas has been published in management journals, such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, or Organizational Research Methods, as well as operations management journals, such as Journal of Operations Management, Decision Sciences, Journal of Business Logistics, or Journal of Supply Chain Management.

Bublu Thakur-Weigold

Bublu Thakur-Weigold is a specialist in innovation diffusion and technology transfer at the Chair of Logistics Management at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). Over the past years, she has gained extensive teaching and research experience in the area of humanitarian logistics and operations. Previously, she worked at Hewlett-Packard as an internal supply chain consultant, instructor, and program manager. Bublu holds a Bachelor’s degree in Management Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Master of Science in International Logistics from the Georgia Institute of Technology.