Fully Flexible Supply chains

Fully flexible supply chains are needed in response to an emergency or humanitarian crisis. In fact, humanitarian supply chains are not fully flexible from the start, they evolve and go through four phases of their life cycle:

• Lean + Collaborative (Prequel)
  • Stockpiling goods
• Agile (Phase 1)
  • Executing quick response
• Fully Flexible (Phase 2)
  • ‘Improvising’ creative solutions on site
• Collaborative + Lean + Agile (Phase 3)
  • Developing systematic/structured activities
  • Returning to ‘normal’

Humanitarian supply chains are ‘extreme’ supply chains with a high level of uncertainty in constantly changing environments. Traditional (slow moving) supply chains may often hinder (rather an facilitate) the response efforts

Humanitarian supply chains

Humanitarian supply chains differ considerably from commercial supply chains, and humanitarian supply chains must deal with perhaps the most challenging requirements of all: They must be able to respond rapidly, serve multiple, destinations simultaneously, coordinate global and local supplies, and more often than not, deal with inefficient means of communication and transportation, or in worst case, an almost total lack of civil means of communication and transportation.

Military supply chains

Military supply chains can be divided into three distinct chains:

One chain, fast but low volume, moves commodities like food, medicine and clothing – the commercial world equivalent of a Wal-Mart or Sears. The second chain transports major components like weapons systems that require maintenance and repair over extended periods. Boeing and Caterpillar would be their commercial equivalents. The third is the deployment chain in which the military must move large number of troops and material in a short period in trying conditions.

The strength of military supply chains lies in their self-supporting autonomy, and the ability to deploy whatever is needed to wherever it is needed, fast and without delay, day and night. These rapid deployment abilities are what humanitarian supply chains sometimes lack, particularly in reaching the most remote affected areas. here, the military can play an important role.

Civil-military collaboration

In disaster response, military supply chains can play a major role side-by-side with humanitarian supply chains. In order to achieve this, roles and responsibilities need to be clearly separated, because the military community has different objectives, schedules and priorities from the humanitarian community. Military operations may enable access for humanitarian operations, but neither party should be part of the other party’s operations. There must be coordination, but not collaboration. During the 2004 Tsunami in Banda Aceh, civil-military cooperation contributed greatly to the success of the rescue efforts. Thailand id not follow in these steps in their post-tsunami planning efforts for emergency logistics.

Humanitarian Logistics Group HUMLOG

When thinking about the ongoing rescue efforts in Padang and in Samoa, I am reminded of HUMLOG, an international research network on humanitarian logistics. The aim of the HUMLOG Group is to research the area of humanitarian logistics in disaster preparedness, response and recovery. The HUMLOG Secretariat is hosted by the HUMLOG Institute, in Helsinki, Finland, and is headed by Gyöngyi Kovács, who also maintains a blog at interorganisational.org.

Resilient organisations

New Zealand, a country that is no stranger to natural disasters, has realized that there is a need for society as a whole to focus on the ability to manage and minimize the impact of disastrous events. There is an intrinsic relationship between organisational resilience and improving the resilience of  communities. That is why they launched a research program titled Resilient Organisations, aimed at assisting New Zealand organisations to recover economic competitiveness after hazard events by improving their resilience.

Author links

• Kate Hughes
• Kim Winter
• Michael Whiting

Links

• hanken.fi: Gyöngyi Kovács
• HUMLOG: humloggroup.org
• resorgs.org.nz: Resilient Organisations

Related

• husdal.com: Emergency logistics
• husdal.com: Can Supply chain Management learn from Emergency Management
• husdal.com: Resilience Revisited
• husdal.com: How New Zealand develops Resilient Organisations

Resilient Organisastions

In 2004 the New Zealand research project Resilient Organisations had barely started and I had the pleasure of meeting one of the driving people behind it, Erica Seville (nee Dalziell), during a 2-month stay at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. In fact, I should probably mention that it was an article by Erica Dalziell and Alan Nicholson that I read in 2001 that sparked my interest in transportation vulnerability in the first place: Dalziell, E., & Nicholson, A. J. (2001). Risk and impact of natural hazards on a road network. Journal of Transportation Engineering, 127(2), 159-166. But anyway, back to the topic.

Vulnerability Matrix

The vulnerability matrix has three dimensions: While criticality and preparedness are the matrix axes, susceptibility becomes a third dimension, related to certain events and their criticality for the organization and preparedness of the organization:

• Criticality
  • How severe is the impact on the organisation if this organisational component is compromised?
• Preparedness
  • How well prepared is the organisation to continue functioning if this component is compromised?
• Susceptibility
  • Contextual: how badly impacted will this component be in the event of this particular scenario?

Event hierarchy

What I also found interesting is how they relate events and their impact:

Resilience

Resilience is here viewed a 3-fold construct, working in a complex, dynamic and interconnected fashion depending on 1) keystone vulnerabilities, criticality and preparedness, 2) situation awareness, stemming from an assessment of the keystone vulnerabilities, and 3) adaptive capacity. Resilience, in essence, is the ability to survive disruptive changes despite severe impact.

In my post: De-confusing SCRM: robustness, resilience, flexibility and agility I present a thorough review of resilience and related concepts.

Conclusion

I like this view on resilience, and the importance of ‘preparedness’ is very similar to the ‘organizational’ requisites seen in Craighead et al. (2007) The Severity of Supply Chain Disruptions: Design Characteristics and Mitigation Capabilities. Here, recovery and warning capability were key organizational factors in mitigating supply chain disruptions. In the end, it is always the human factor that matters, not technology. And perhaps, resilience is what New Orleans needs next time a hurricane like Katrina threatens the city and its built environment.

Reference

Erica Seville, David Brunsdon, Andre Dantas, Jason Le Masurier, Suzanne Wilkinson, & John Vargo (2008). Organisational resilience: Researching the reality of New Zealand organisations Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning , 2 (3), 258-266

Author links

• rsrc.co.nz: Erica Seville, nee Dalziell
• kestrel.co.nz: David Brunsdon
• canterbury.ac.uk: Andre Dantas
• canterbury.ac.uk: Jason Le Masurier
• auckland.ac.nz: Suzanne Wilkinson
• canterbury.ac.uk: John Vargo

Downloads

• resorgs.org.nz: Resilience Management (pdf)

Links

• resorgs.org.nz: Resilient Organisations

Related

• husdal.com: De-confusing SCRM: robustness, resilience, flexibility and agility
• husdal.com: The Severity of Supply Chain Disruptions: Design Characteristics and Mitigation Capabilities

The New Zealand Lifelines Engineering Project

The project examined and compared lifelines engineering practice at three levels – international,  regional and individual road controlling authorities, its level of integration in road controlling authority management practices, and its relationship to the resilience of road networks to natural hazards.Relative risk exposures arising from natural hazards and their impacts on regions were assessed at a qualitative level, highlighting the importance of a comprehensive lifelines approach throughout much of the country.

What is lifelines engineering?

In the report, the term ‘engineering lifelines activity’ or other references to ‘lifelines’ refers to

a collaborative inter-utility and cross-sector planning process to reduce the pre- and  postemergency impacts of low probability disaster-scale events.

Note the emphasis on low-probability and disaster-scale events. I find this very interesting, because it is contrary to what I use in my research on sparse transportation networks.

What are lifelines?

The report defines lifelines as

essential ‘utility’ services which support the life of the community – such as water, wastewater and stormwater, power, gas, and telecommunications and transportation networks.

Also worth noting is that

there is a high level of dependence by other lifeline utilities on roading networks – for example, water, sewerage, power and telecommunications services all use the road corridor and often also rely on structures such as road bridges. A failure of part of the road network may not only result in the consequential loss of another service, but also make access more difficult to repair and restore the service.

These interdependencies is something that should not come as a surprise. More often than not, however, it does come as a surprise, once disaster has struck.

What is resilience?

The primary objective of the project was to reduce the impact of natural hazards on land transport infrastructure by investigating whether the engineering lifelines approach had increased the resilience of New Zealand’s land transport system. Resilience is defined as

the ability of a system or network to continue to support the community and meet the community’s social, economic and environmental needs, following a major hazard event

There may be the following disruptions to the communities’ needs:

• social – restricted accessibility; unable to reach people; education and health services disrupted
• economic – businesses unable to trade or move goods
• environmental – direct damage

The report suggests a number of parameters that could be used to assess resilience:

• the resistance of the asset itself to a hazard event, i.e. the ‘damaged/usable ratio’
• the network layout and whether there are alternative routes
• the volume of traffic in relation to the level of service offered by the road
• the time that it would take to restore the road network

It is obvious that the resilience of assets, or a network, to hazard events has a direct impact on the communities’ well-being. The full impact on the well-being will of course depend on the consequences that asset failure has on traffic flows and how this actually impacts the community. Fully understanding this is imperative prior to any mitigation measures.

Conclusion

While the report focuses specifically on New Zealand, it is still generally applicable, because roads are an important infrastructure asset, particularly so in times of disaster, something that I will highlight more in my next post tomorrow: Are roads more important than computers?

Reference

Gordon, M., & Matheson, S. (2008). Engineering lifelines and transport – should New Zealand be doing it better? (Research Report 355A): New Zealand Transport Agency.

Downloads

Download the research report here:

• Engineering lifelines and transport – should. New Zealand be doing it better? Part one.
• Engineering lifelines and transport – should. New Zealand be doing it better? Part two.

Related

• husdal.com: Supply chain Disruptions in Sparse Transportation Networks
• husdal.com: Are roads more important than computers?
• husdal.com: Highway Vulnerability and Criticality Asssessment

Links

• resorgs.org.nz: How New Zealand develops resilient organizations

What is resilience?

One major strategy to overcome such disruptions is to ensure that there is sufficient resilience in the supply chain.

Resilience is a function of situation awareness, management of keystone vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity in a complex, dynamic and interconnected environment. (Resilient Organisations Research Report 2007/01)

And the degree to which you are resilient and ready determines your ability to react to, respond to and recover from any supply chain disruption. All four elements need to be in place, reducing your key vulnerabilities, being ready to adapt and change your supply chain, responding appropriately to unwanted events and having a clear strategy for how your are going to recover from a major setback is what will set you apart from the rest of the crowd, should “disaster” strike.

Resilient organisations

If you have everything in place, no need to read further, if not, I do recommend you to visit website of the New Zealand research project Resilient Organisations, www.resorgs.org.nz. You can also find useful hints on how to build a resilient supply chain in the article  Building a Resilient Supply Chain by Yossi Sheffi in The Harvard Business Online.

Links

• Harvard Business Online: Building a Resilient Supply Chain
• resorgs.org.nz: Resilient Organisations

Related

• husdal.com: How New Zealand develops Resilient Organisations
• husdal.com: Resilience Revisited
• husdal.com: Humanitarian and Military Supply Chains must work side-by-side

Resilient organisations

There is a load of information the Resilient organisations project home page: research reports, new findings, publications, events and conferences.

Resilient Organisations is a six year research project designed to assist New Zealand organisations to recover economic competitiveness after hazard events by improving their resilience.

Maybe not everything is supply chain or transport-related, but nonetheless, it’s well worth a look. Resilience is applicable anywhere.

Resilience Management

Their newest research report is just out: Resilience Management: A framework for assessing and improving the resilience of Organisations.

There is an intrinsic relationship between organisational resilience and improving the resilience of  communities. Enabling the continued operation of organisations, in and following crises,  significantly impacts on the medium to long term recovery and health of the wider community.  Increased resilience is also important when considering the interconnectedness of modern  organisations, where disruptions can have significant and widespread impacts globally. There is  increasing demand for organisations to exhibit high reliability in the face of adversity; decision  makers must address not only the crises that they know will happen, but also those that they cannot  foresee.

The term resilience has been used freely across a wide range of academic disciplines and in  many different contexts. There is little consensus regarding what resilience is, what it means for  organisations and, more importantly, how organisations might achieve greater resilience in the face  of increasing threats. This study offers a definition of resilience that is applicable to organisations.

Resilience is a function of an organisation’s situation awareness, management of keystone  vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity in a complex, dynamic and interconnected environment.

The  research described in this report looks at ten New Zealand organisations from a range of  industry sectors, sizes, localities and types to discover common issues that foster or create barriers  to increased resilience. A process for Resilience Management is described for both evaluating and  improving an organisation’s resilience.

The full report can be downloaded from the project website.

Downloads

• res.orgs.org.nz: Resilience Management

Links

• resorgs.org.nz: Resilient Organisations

Related

• husdal.com: Can Suply Chain Management learn from Emergency Management
• husdal.com: Resilience Revisited
• husdal.com: Humanitarian and Military Supply Chains must work side-by-side