Over the next few weeks, I will be doing some maintenance on A Humourless Lot. As a result, you might see some small changes in lay-out, and there might be the occasional very short period of down-time. I hope that, in the end, it will lead to a better blog that is easier to read and use.

Secondly, the number of attempted spam comments has grown to more than 10,000/month. Up to now, I tried to screen manually everything that Akismet flagged as spam before permanently deleting; with these numbers of spam comments and a filter accuracy of more than 99.98% (i.e. only one or two legit comments per month that are trashed), this is no longer possible, and consequently I will send everything that looks like spam to Akismet to the great bit fields. If your comment does not appear, just send me a message and I will retrieve it from the sin bin – but please do so within a couple of days, because that is how long it will remain in limbo before being terminated with extreme prejudice.

Thirdly, I have had some questions about possible conflicts of interest because I write about global health and aid while having been (and hopefully being again) employed in that sector. I really don’t want to have to think about every possible conflict of interest every time I write an article. So, here is my generic disclaimer: assume that everything I write is conflicted to the utmost; that all my opinions are paid for by the highest bidder (and in case I have forgotten to arrange this, that this will be corrected forthwith); that my writing is as partisan and biased as is humanly possible; and that everything you read on this blog needs to be verified and checked – and double-checked. And then judge what I write on its arguments, not on who it’s coming from.

We apologise for this short intermission and will now resume our normal program.

[Image: DrinkSJB by SJB @ Picasa. Some rights reserved.]

• Africa to meet the MDGs? I would be surprised, but stranger things have happened.
• Yet another illustration of why logistics is so important for global health.
• Emergency preparedness has come up more than once on this blog. Luckily I am not the only one to pay attention to it, but why is the call for better preparedness so often ignored?

[Image: Liquid Links by Desirae; some rights reserved.]

Distribution center of Kühne + Nagel in Hamburg, Germany. K+N is one of the largest 3PL providers in Europe.

We have seen what third-party logistics is and what are its strengths and weaknesses; and why it will be part of logistics for global health and aid. But what does this mean for us? What will change in the way we work?

Improved information management practices

To be able to work well with 3PL providers, we will need to improve our information management: without knowing fairly well what needs to go where (and hence, what is where and what already goes where), we will not be able to enjoy the advantages of 3PL. What’s more, the more advanced 3PL providers have developed their own supply chain visibility solutions; and not only that, but often they are keen to help us to make our own systems interoperable with theirs, which almost inevitably will lead to better systems for our own use. They do that, not from the goodness of their hearts, but because their customers asked for it – you know, “no delegation without verification” – and because they think that better interoperability will also lead to better efficiency of their own processes.

Smaller logistics departments

If we can outsource all or most of our boring, ‘routine’ logistics work to 3PL providers, our own logistics departments can concentrate on those logistics that are not easily transferable: because they are in high-security settings, or because of specific sensitivities that mean that we cannot use 3PL providers without damaging our operations, or because they are in places where, quite simply, there are no 3PL providers. What remains is a small, highly specialised, highly professional, very flexible unit that delivers four types of services: supply chain management in places where 3PL providers cannot deliver or their services are not acceptable; leadership and coordination of quick scale-ups of operations in case of a sudden emergency; development and monitoring of logistics policies and contracts (including those with 3PL providers); and specialised logistics input for development of policies in other areas and for management.

Bigger logistics departments

Got you there, didn’t I?

Think of this: why would 3PL providers necessarily be from outside the aid world? We already see some 3PL activities from aid organisations themselves, e.g. WFP’s role as logistics provider of last resort in the cluster system. So why wouldn’t some of the larger aid organisations with strong logistics capacities act as 3PL providers for smaller organisations? I can easily foresee that organisations like WFP, MSF, or Oxfam, or perhaps even some governmental health logistics units would start delivering 3PL services to other aid organisations or even ministries of health. After all, they know better than most generic 3PL providers how to operate in the settings where we work, and hence can provide even better (and probably cheaper) services. These hybrid service delivery organisations will, by necessity, grow larger than they are now.

Greater logistics departments

Whichever of these choices these departments make, it will always allow them to become better than they are now: more specialised, more focused on their strengths and less exposed in their weaknesses, more flexible, more efficient, using synergies where they occur (instead of ignoring them as we often do now).

So what are your views? Is this too rosy a picture? Are you already going this way? Things I have missed?

• Yet another scholarship from the awesome Zaragoza Logistics Center.
• The British Red Cross combines fundraising and teaching people about the logistics realities of a disaster in a hands-on, weekend-long exercise. Looks very appealing. The BRC has been raising its logistics profile over the last year or so in some very interesting ways.
• Forward Accountability: the best new development in development since the air-conditioned Landcruiser.
• Well, well, well. The UN waking up to the importance of logistics for peacekeeping.
• Sigh. Condoms costing lives? Hardly.
• I have said it before and I will say it again: aid is complex and trying to simplify it does not help. Luckily I am not the only one to say so.

[Image: Liquid Links by Desirae; some rights reserved.]

• One that is a bit different from our regular fare: Emory University (Atlanta, USA) is looking for a coordinator, programme logistics to coordinate distribution of a large donation antibiotics for the International Trachoma Initiative.
• IRC is looking for for a senior logistics coordinator for Congo (DRC), a logistics technical specialist for Chad and Congo (DRC), a logistics process and controls documentation consultant for their HQ in the USA, a logistics manager for Haiti, and a logistics coordinator for their refugee programme in the USA.
• Merlin is looking for logisticians for North Maniema, Congo (DRC) and for Haiti/Dominican Republic; logistics coordinators for Liberia, Kenya, Haiti, and Congo (DRC); and a supply chain coordinator for Congo (DRC).
• Oxfam GB is looking for a regional logistics manager for West Africa, based in Dakar (Senegal). Apparently they are also looking for a regional logistics manager for Latin America and the Caribbean and a logistics coordinator for Sudan, but this is not advertised on their own site.
• Save The Children UK is looking for a logistics adviser for Angola. They also seem to be looking for a global supply chain manager (based in the UK), but I cannot locate this vacancy on their site.
• The IMC is looking for logistics coordinators for Haiti and Congo (DRC), and a logistics and commodities officer for their HQ in the USA.
• Management Systems International (MSI) is looking for an administration and logistics coordinator for Afghanistan. They also seem to be looking for a deputy chief of party, finance and logistics management for Afghanistan, but that vacancy is not advertised on their own site.
• The Louis Berger Group is looking for an administration and logistics coordinator for Afghanistan; I suspect that this is the same position that is advertised by MSI. They are also looking for a procurement manager for Afghanistan.
• Intermón Oxfam is looking for a logadmin officer for Abéché (Chad) and a logistics officer for Warrab State (Sudan).
• The American Refugee Committee (ARC) is looking for a logistics and security coordinator for Haiti.
• Apparently, the Samaritan’s Purse is looking for a program manager, logistics for Haiti, but this vacancy is not advertised on their site.
• Populations Services International (PSI) are looking for a consultant, operations and logistics technical advisor for Haiti; and a contracts analyst, a contracts assistant, a senior Zprocurement and logistics officer, a voluntary pooled procurement and logistics officer and a senior ditto, all for the HQ in Washington DC (USA).
• Solidarités are looking for a logistics coordinator, a logistician, and a distribution manager for Haiti; an administrative and logistics coordinator for Zimbabwe, and a logistics and administrative field coordinator for Teknaf (Bangladesh).
• ACTED is looking for logistic interns for Chad and Haiti, country logistic managers for Sudan, Chad and Haiti, and country logistic and security managers for Yemen and Iraq.
• UNICEF are looking for a logistics officer for Sierra Leone, two supply and logistics specialists for Senegal, a senior contracts assistant for their HQ in New York (USA), a logistics specialist for Chad, a procurement assistant – planning for their supply division in Copenhagen (Denmark). As usual, their vacancies are hidden in a password-protected system, so I cannot link. Please don’t forget to bitch about this when applying!
• The British Red Cross is looking for a logistician for their emergency response unit.

Sigh. Did anyone read my earlier rant on bad job advertisement practices?

[Image: Job opportunities by Coffeechica]

In my first article on 3PL, I explored the concept and some of its advantages and disadvantages. In this article, I will explain why I think 3PL will become more and more important for global health and aid.

The push for economy

Rightly or wrongly (and if you followed this blog you know where I stand on that question), there is a big push from donors to economise on ‘HQ’ or ‘overhead’. This means that the pressure is on to decrease the size of departments in headquarters, including logistics departments^[1]. Conversely, when there is a crisis, it is fairly easy to get donors to fund the necessary extra capacity that is needed specifically for that crisis. This fits very well with the 3PL model: when there is a crisis, we can quickly ‘buy’ additional capacity.

Of course, this is sound thinking anyway, even apart from donor pressure: why would you want to pay for capacity when it’s not necessary? Large logistics departments are often legacies from a different era, when it was normal to have everything in-house and outsourcing was unheard of.

The move to urbanised settings

As more of the world’s population is concentrated in urbanised areas, more of our work is done in those areas too. Especially in aid, the idea that our work would take us mostly to out-of-the-way locations in the bush, is thoroughly antiquated: more and more, we work in the shantytowns, slums, barrios, favelas, or whatever they might be called. Local 3PL contractors (see the picture to the right for a good example) are at an advantage here compared to having our own transport fleet. Specifically for aid activities, an added bonus is that we pour more money in the local economy instead of using the iconic, imported white landcruiser.

But even more conventional 3PL providers have an edge here: unlike in many more rural areas, they do have a presence in and knowledge of most cities and many towns. I haven’t worked in any capital yet in which they were not represented, and very few larger towns.

New models of cooperation

Many 3PL providers are actively trying to acquire knowledge of and expertise in fields that were traditionally the preserve of specialised organisations like NGOs and ministries of health. They see large growth opportunities and are keen to get on board, learning as they go in order to be able to deliver better quality than the competition. This also means that they are prepared to cooperate in new ways, using new models that are a better fit with global health and aid work; e.g. temporarily stationing staff within a logistics unit to improve support and communication, or helping to make information systems interoperable (something I will write more about in the next article in this miniseries). For us, this is a big opportunity to improve our effectiveness and efficiency by using what the providers offer in the way of expertise and (not unimportantly)  funds and operations scale.

Where this will lead us

It will be clear that the use of 3PL can have big advantages for global health and aid. However, to be able to use the opportunities that are offered, we will need to work hard on some of our outlooks and practices. In the next article in this series, I will describe what this will mean for how we work.

[Images by Erik Söderström and C. Frank Starmer. Some rights reserved.]

Footnote

Back to post [1] This is actually becoming a bit less of an issue for health authorities now that there is more attention for ‘systems strengthening’. Perversely, it is actually becoming more important for aid organisations.

Wow. That is quite something. The point of all this seems to be in these two sentences:

Given the ongoing crisis in Haiti, it may seem unpalatable to scrutinise and criticise the motives and activities of humanitarian organisations. But just like any other industry, the aid industry must be examined, not just financially as is current practice, but also in how it operates from headquarter level to field level.

Allow me to make five observations here. The first is that The Lancet does not offer any evidence to back up their claims. They might be right, they might be wrong – but without the evidence we will never know.

Secondly, I happen to think they make valid points, which are sadly invalidated by the way they are phrased as blanket statements. Organisations, including aid organisations, are not monoliths and exhibit widely divergent behaviour on different occasions. The same organisation that acts disgracefully on one occasion can be a beacon of selfless and ethical behaviour in another setting; sometimes even at the same time. Obviously this holds true even more when one makes this sort of pronouncements across a whole industry.

Thirdly, the article conflates all types of aid into one, prescribing humanitarianism as the overriding principle for all aid. The authors ignore that not all aid is humanitarian aid; e.g. bilateral reconstruction aid or nation-building aid has nothing to do with humanitarianism, unless one would stretch the concept to a point where it becomes meaningless. I am writing an article on typologies of aid (and let me tell you, it is not easy going) because this sort of conceptual confusion is actually quite common and leads to meaningless discussions.

Fourth, shorn of its rhetoric, The Lancet makes a valid point when they say that more scrutiny of the sector would be beneficial. The critiques that I have seen up to now are mostly (perhaps even almost exclusively) very superficial, and are for a large part either hagiographic on the one hand or bludgeoningly hypercritical on the other; and most of them are thin on evidence (more so when looking at emergency and humanitarian aid than development aid). It is high time for more critical scrutiny that is balanced and based on evidence, mainly because it could be a catalyst for huge improvements in our practices.

Fifth, I am disappointed by a lack of suggestions for improvement. It is easy to be critical, but then please tell us what and how we can improve – and in slightly more detail than that we need to ‘coordinate better’. I am not suggesting that should have been in the same article – after all, an editorial has its limits – but as it was published in a special issue on violent conflict and health, there would have been ample space for a more in-depth article in that same issue, spelling out how to get the sector to the next level. Sadly, the editors did not do so.

All in all, I think the editorial suggests rightly that more scrutiny is necessary – but that point is sadly overshadowed by the article’s conceptual fallacies, lack of evidence for its claims, and general emphasis on rhetoric over content.

Over at his blog Wanderlust, Tris Clements questions whether sending in SAR teams is the wisest way to spend our resources:

If, as is generally shown, SAR teams can only hit the ground after 48 hours, and are only saving a few dozen lives in any given reponse [sic], is this a worthwhile use of funding? Should the media continue to carry such high-profile stories and continue to justify this as the best way forward in an emergency? Had an additional 1,200 medical staff and equipment been flown in to Port-au-Prince instead, how many people could they have treated, how many life-threatening wound infections treated, how many shock-managing IV drips inserted, in the last three or four days? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

These are important and relevant questions. However, I think Tris leaves out an important part of the equation: why do we actually send out these SAR teams?

Part of it can be found in an intriguing comment in response to my blog post on the logistics of emergency response: commenter rob_s suggests to send local people involved in emergency preparedness in developing countries to disasters like Haiti earthquake, so they can learn from and experience firsthand the lessons learned.

This is exactly how many of the developed countries who have sent SAR teams think. It is not only altruism, or even a PR exercise, but also a valuable opportunity for these teams to train and learn, so they are better able to respond when something similar happens in their own countries. In that sense, one should add the lives saved by better preparedness in future disasters to the lives saved now; but it will be obvious that any estimate of how many lives we are talking about is no more than a guess, educated or otherwise.

Tris’ questions are still very relevant, and the answer is still likely to be that the resources spent on foreign SAR teams could be spent better elsewhere; but the arithmetic is a bit more complicated than he makes it out to be.

[Image: Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue at Montana Hotel in Port-au-Prince, by Chuck Simmins. Some rights reserved.]

But first: although I am on standby for Haiti, I am not there, so everything that I say here specifically about the situation there is only second-hand, from what I hear from friends and colleagues and from what I read in the media.

And secondly: this is not a crash course in emergency logistics, nor will it be very helpful for the logisticians who are there or will be going there. If anything that you read here is new to you, you have no business of going to Haiti as a logistician (unless you will be supervised there by people who do know).

Why is logistics in Haiti so much more difficult than in other disasters?

It isn’t. Really, not at all.

Every sudden-onset disaster causes similar logistics problems. The 2004 tsunami, the earthquakes in China and Iran, even hurricane Katrina in the US: in all of these cases logistics was the main limiting factor for aid.

A painful truth that you will not hear spelled out very often: emergency aid in these circumstances is totally dependent on local preparation, and any aid that that will come from outside the area will be largely ineffective until the logistics has been cleared up – which is usually only after several days in the most favourable circumstances. This is why disaster preparedness is so important, and it is also a main reason why countries like Haiti, which don’t have much capacity for disaster preparedness in the first place, are always so badly hit when the (inevitable) disaster strikes. It is also why expectations of what aid will accomplish over the next couple of days should not be set very high (and why twits like this guy, or this nitwit, should seriously shut up until they know what they are talking about – and that I use these harsh terms here, which I have never done before, should say something).

So why do I hear so much more about logistics now than in previous disasters?

I think you are asking the wrong person (I am a logistics specialist and have no clue about media), but I have observed two parallel developments over the last couple of years that might have contributed:

1. For the second time in the history of modern of humanitarian aid (the first time was in the early 1980s), aid organisations have been refocussing on logistics as a core competence for aid. Especially the 2004 tsunami was a rude shock for many established organisations, who had become complacent about their logistics capacities and had stopped investing in it – and as a result operated at (to put it in friendly terms) less than optimal levels of effectiveness. Since then, logistics capacity is again increasingly seen as a sine qua non for effective aid, and emergency aid organisations are (again) talking about it as a key competency – also to the media.
2. Also outside of the organisations themselves, people started to become interested in humanitarian logistics, and there has been much more coverage of it. Recently there have been a number of  books on the subject released, universities have started taking an interest in it as a subject of serious research (and teaching), aid watchers have put the occasional spotlight on aid logistics, and bloggers have started writing about it (with even the occasional blog totally dedicated to the subject). All this has contributed to more attention in the press and the public at large to aid logistics, and I think we now see the first results in the huge attention for the logistics in Haiti.

In that case, what are the main logistics challenges in disasters like this?

Remember, logistics is all about the five rights: the right goods, in the right quantity, to the right place, at the right time, at the right price. One of the main issues here (and one that I have seen very little coverage of) is that in a chaotic situation like this we just don’t know what are the right goods, the right quantities, or even the right place. Needs assessment is incredibly difficult, especially in view of how difficult it is to access some areas.

“So”, I hear you say, “just send as much as possible of everything, and we’ll sort things out later”. That would be a very nice idea, if we weren’t already struggling with overburdened and disrupted infrastructure (more about that later); everything that we send that is not needed, means that we cannot send something that is needed. This is a precarious juggling act, and although logisticians have some tools to deal with it (e.g. the much-vaunted kit system, a development from the 1980s first aid logistics revolution – but one that is nearing the end of its shelf life, for reasons that I will explain at some other time), it is still the major forgotten logistics challenge.

Furthermore, unused goods can become a serious liability after the crisis; e.g. the Indonesian government had to spend untold millions of dollars on disposal of unwanted goods after the 2004 tsunami, causing a serious burden on the reconstruction.

A second issue that is under-reported, is the logistics of logistics: logistics is an immensely fuel-hungry venture (think cars, think trucks, think planes and helicopters, think generators), and getting the fuel where it is needed is not easy. In this sense, Haiti will probably be rather easier than most crises, due to the proximity of two of the largest oil producing countries in the world, and the largest navy fleet in the world; expect one or more of the US Navy’s Brobdingnagian supply ships to turn up soon with large fuel stores.

A third main issue is the wide-spread destruction of physical infrastructure. Port-au-Prince’s harbour at the moment is effectively useless, the airport (not one with a very high capacity in the first place) is damaged, and roads are destroyed and blocked. Large transport helicopters would be immensely helpful but are by far the most fuel-guzzling mode of transport (there we go again with the juggling act) and are not that easy to get there because of their limited operational range; e.g. an Mi-26 (carrying 20 tonnes) ranges only 800 kilometres, which can be extended to 1900 kilometres using additional fuel tanks – but that would seriously impact on its load carrying capacity.

In the fourth place, communications will be difficult. Over the last years, aid organisations have become more and more reliant on telephone communications, and these will be disrupted and overburdened. Many organisations have lost their expertise in radio communications (five years ago, I could program and set up a Q-mac, a backpack-sized mobile HF transceiver, in ten minutes flat, three minutes if it was pre-programmed; I now would need a manual and at least 30 minutes), and many of their staff have no clue about radio protocol – which sounds boring but is absolutely necessary to prevent total chaos on your radio channels. As a result, communication will be a real challenge.

Fifth is coordination. There will be such a host of different organisations on the ground that it will be difficult to ensure that we don’t duplicate efforts (well, duplicate as little as possible). Even more important is to avoid hindering each other, e.g. by using the available infrastructure inefficiently, causing congestion. This is one of the reasons why I would seriously suggest smaller organisations and individuals (especially those that have no previous experience in emergency response) to stay away and not even consider going there before the third stage response starts to set in (probably in about two weeks). For the people on the ground, this means going to coordination meetings. People who have worked with me know that I mostly consider these as a waste of time (I think using personal networks is almost always much more effective and efficient) – but the one main exception is during the first phases of an emergency response. So yes, even in situations like this, humanitarian logistics will involve long hours in airless rooms trying to come to agreements and exchanging information; sorry to prick your romantic bubble.
Update January 17, 10 AM AEDST Apart from going to the coordination meetings, of course it is essential that aid logisticians use and contribute to the information on the log cluster web site.

And then there is the longer term to think of. Decisions taken now can have serious repercussions later, and this is something that every loggie worth their salt will continuously have in the back of their mind. The last thing you want to happen is saving a life now, but costing multiple lives later on in the response.

Apart from these six primary ones, there is a host of secondary issues that I will not bore you with, but that will cause my colleagues in the field more than one heartache.

Any good news?

Well, I already mentioned the proximity of Venezuela and the US. One other thing that will make my colleagues’ lives a bit easier is that, although the number of victims is staggering, the geographical spread of the disaster is relatively limited (compared to e.g. the South China, Pakistan, and Iran earthquakes), so once we can get them there and the fuel issue is solved, widespread use of helicopters actually is a realistic option. And finally, the neighbouring Dominican Republic has been spared the worst of the disaster and can be used as a staging ground for the response.

So what can I do?

For this stage of the response, not much. Donating money (not goods!) to a reputable aid organisation with expertise in emergency response and a pre-existing presence on the ground might help for the longer term, but in the short term the needs seem to be met. Keep on giving, but with an eye on the longer term.

Don’t go out there. You cannot help and will only be a burden to the people who can. The only exception is if you are a humanitarian or military logistician with experience in emergency response, in which case I would suggest that you contact the organisation with which you have worked before (other organisations will not have time to vet your credentials and will use their own roster of experienced people).

And finally: spread the word about these issues far and wide, so that people start giving for emergency preparedness and not only the response; including the building of capacity within the aid organisations, like expertise at HQ level. This is one of the reasons why aid organisations spend money on ‘overhead’, and why it is so silly to judge aid organisations by the percentage spent on overhead.

Finally, comment freely in the comments section, and don’t hesitate to ask questions.

Updates

January 18, 1 PM AEDST

• WFP is contracting to get the fuel situation solved.
• US forces have taken over traffic control of the Port-au-Prince airport, but ther are some questions about how they set priorities.
• Security issues are now added to the list of logistics issues: there are reports of looting (especially at night) and the UN is recommending that aid convoys be secured by armed personnel, but there is some disagreement on how widespread and serious this actually is.

January 18, 4 PM AEDST

According to WFP, repairs to the south pier of Port-au-Prince’s harbour are underway. Informally, I have heard that some ships might be able to dock by Tuesday (local time); if that is true, that would be very good news!

January 19, 3 PM AEDST

• The informal information I received about the opening of the harbour now seems to be confirmed officially.
• Until the harbour opens, the airport remains one of the main bottlenecks. Conflicts about priorities are now fought out over Twitter, which I can only be very unhappy about: this is a triumph of the loudest voice instead of reason. Perhaps MSF’s flight should have gotten highest priority, but getting that about by flooding the USAF Twitter account is not the way to go — and I am afraid that this tactic will actually be detrimental to MSF’s interests and, more importantly, their patients’ interests in the long term.
• In general, more and more aid does seem to get to the people who need it. This, again, follows more or less the normal pattern: as logistics bottlenecks are solved and needs are assessed, the ‘pipeline’ widens and lengthens and items are getting where they are needed.

January 19, 5 PM AEDST

WFP logistician and aid blogging guru Peter Casier, on his way to the Dominican Republic to head WFP’s logistics operations there, confirms that the fuel contract was obtained yesterday and that the first fuel truck already arrived in Port-au-Prince. This will take a lot of pressure from the logisticians there.

January 20, 11 AM AEDST

• Director of communications for MSF-Canada, Avril Benoît, takes me to task on Twitter: she says that the concrete impact of the “Twitter agitation” is exaggerated and that Twitter is only a small part of MSF’s media advocacy. That might be so, but that does not negate that it was a poorly conceived idea that sets a precedent for future similar campaigns with even less reason. It will also not have made MSF any friends at the place where it matters: the people making the hour-to-hour decisions based on the priorities set — which put medical supplies only at fourth place, for reasons that one might disagree with but that are definitely not total nonsense.
• As expected, the South pier of Port-au-Prince harbour can now receive geared ships and barges; however, the container terminal is still inoperative and remains so for the near future.
• UNHAS has contracted a 12 mt plane that will start a cargo shuttle between Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince.

January 20, 11 PM AEDST

• WFP starts a cargo shuttle between Santo Domingo and various sites in Haiti.
• Apparently coordination on the ground between aid agencies is fairly good compared to earlier large-scale disasters. However, this is a second-hand impression gleaned from a very limited number of people, so it could be totally incorrect.

• Merlin is looking for logisticians for Nyala and Nimule, both in Sudan, a senior logistician/project officer for Lodwar (Kenya), and for a logistics coordinator for Congo (DRC).
• MSH are looking for logistics assistants in Egypt and Congo (DRC), a district logistics specialist for Uganda, a logistics coordinator for Sudan, a logistics manager for Rwanda, a procurement associate for Côte d’Ivoire, a Senior Technical Advisor, Supply Chain Operations for Malawi, and a warehouse manager for Haiti.
• UNICEF is looking for Regional Chief of Supply based in Dakar (Senegal), and a regional cold chain and logistics specialist based in Nairobi (Kenya). And a mini-rant on this one: why on earth does UNICEF hide their vacancies behind a password-protected, registered-applicants only database (so I cannot link to them) – are these vacancies so sensitive? And why post a vacancy on ReliefWeb that is not included in their own database? For such a big organisation, this is really amateur hour.

[Image: Job opportunities by Coffeechica]

• An old post by Jeff Ashcroft at the Supply Chain Network talks about applying supply chain management principles to human resource management. I guess it is the HR equivalent of my application of the five rights of logistics to information management. (H/T to Jurgen Hulst.)
• IRC’s Anna Husarska writes about the significance of the chukudu, the wooden ‘bike’ that you can see everywhere in Goma.

[Image: Liquid Links by Desirae; some rights reserved.]

Five-party logistics?

I have written several times before about supply chain visibility, and where it will lead us. One of the main reasons why visibility will be such an important issue for the foreseeable future, is because third-party logistics (or 3PL) will become more and more important.

So, I hear you ask, what is this 3PL? And why would it become more important? And, last but not least, why would that imply that supply chain visibility would become more important? I will write about those last two questions in a next post; this post will concentrate on an explanation of 3PL and its advantages (and disadvantages).

To explain this, let’s have a look at a fairly common scenario. Let’s say that you are the logistics manager of an aid organisation that has a central warehouse in the capital, and a couple of projects around the country, and you need to send a shipment from the central warehouse to one of the projects. Basically, you have two choices:

1. You use your own transport, sending a truck (owned or rented) with the shipment from your central warehouse to the project. As you are the ‘first party’ in the shipment, this is known as first-party logistics or 1PL.
2. You contract a transport company to ship the goods to the project, based on a contract and a waybill. The transport company (or as loggies like to call them, the carrier) is also known as a ‘second party’, and hence this is an example of second-party logistics or 2PL.

Most likely you now have an idea where this is going, but let’s spell it out anyway. Instead of having your own warehouse and trucks, you could have an external provider organise all this for you. You only need to tell the provider that a shipment made up of so many of this item needs to go to that project, and they take care of the rest (at a price, of course). A provider who offers this sort of multiple, integrated services, is called a third party and (you guessed it) this is an example of 3PL. 3PL providers come in all kinds, some offering a wider array of services than others; some very familiar ones are international couriers and international postal services, and freight forwarders: all three offer to organise your shipment across a variety of carriers and often (but not always) include clearing services.

Needless to say that there is actually an animal called fourth-party logistics (or 4PL), but I will leave that one for another day.

The reason for 3PL to exist at all is threefold:

1. 3PL providers are specialised in integration of links in the supply chain, and they can levy much more expertise in this field than any aid or global health organisation ever will be able to. They know the markets to the last digit, have extensive knowledge of and experience in integrated supply chains, and have seen the same issues crop up over a variety of organisations – and know of many techniques to overcome these issues.
2. 3PL providers can leverage economies of scale through combined facilities and shipping at much larger scales than any but the biggest aid and global health organisations, potentially providing better efficiency.
3. 3PL allows for easier up and down-scaling: as our needs change, we can just use more or less of the provider’s services, instead of having to deal with a restructuring of our organisation (including possibly painful measures like lay-offs, or, conversely, having to go through expedited hiring of new staff, with all kinds of risks attached).

3PL by the US and Indonesian armies on behalf of USAID.

Of course, there are good reasons why 3PL can be a very bad idea, too – or even impossible:

1. Aid and global health work often takes place in places and markets in which 3PL providers have no or very little experience, which might mean that their general expertise does not add that much value.
2. In some contexts in which we work, 3PL providers (and, indeed, 2 PL providers) do not operate because of security constraints.
3. Specifically for humanitarian aid, it is important to adhere to standards of neutrality and impartiality; it can be difficult to verify that 3PL providers do so, and the added limitations could mean that they are not able to offer any increased efficiency (e.g., it implies some limitations regarding combined cargo).
4. In case of disaster response, many 3PL providers would have difficulties dealing with the damaged and overburdened infrastructure, which aid organisations have much more expertise in.

Yet, taking all this into account, I still foresee that we will use more and more 3PL services. Stay tuned to read why.

[Images: Mailboxes by by Minesweeper @ Wikipedia (public domain); untitled photo by Pacom Webmaster (some rights reserved).]

• Like last year, the Zaragoza Logistics Center offers scholarships for some of its students. The latest scholarship offering is specifically targeted at logisticians working in Africa.
• Georgia Tech will host a conference on health and humanitarian logistics this March.
• In this year’s European Conference on Operational Research, there will be a track on OR for Development and Developing Countries.

Big h/t to the humlognews newsletter.

Have you ever thought about the reverse logistics in your supply chains? Very likely if you are involved in medical logistics, but probably not in those terms: reverse logistics is not something that comes up on a daily basis in discussions in our field.

Reverse logistics is basically what happens when goods need to flow back in the supply chain. The most obvious example is of course when expired drugs need to be sent back for proper disposal, but reverse logistics might actually be more common than you think: disposal of materials and equipment, recalls, returns of overstocks so they can be used somewhere else in the organisation: these are all examples of reverse logistics.

Yet we hardly ever put systems into place that deal with our reverse logistics; possibly because it is seen as an exception instead of the regular occurrence that it actually is in many organisations. The results are predictable: losses and negative side-effects are common. Some examples:

• Financial losses Most organisations would have tight controls on expensive goods as they travel through the ‘normal’ supply chain. However, I have seen many instances in which these controls were absent or much less stringent when dealing with reverse logistics. In one example, when trying to see what happened with a large generator (value: several tens of thousands of dollars) after it was sent back for repairs, I discovered that nobody had actually followed up after it was sent back and a replacement arrived, and in the end it was untraceable. This was a big and unnecessary loss for the organisation.
• Negative health effects If expired drugs are taken from the reverse supply chain and used (possibly after having been sold on the local market), they can wreak havoc on the health of the people using them; some drugs become toxic after some time, but even those who do not will probably start losing efficacy and would be as bad as under-strength counterfeit drugs – and that is even apart from the effects of uncontrolled use of e.g. antibiotics on the development of resistant strains.
• Environmental damage Drugs might be beneficial for us, but they are not always so for our environment. Many drugs are toxic for other animals and plants; and even when they are not, it is not always clear what would be the long-term effects on the environment of uncontrolled dumping of drugs. That alone should be enough to have tight controls on what happens with expired drugs and how they are disposed of. This is even more true of e.g. used engine oil and other toxic waste: do you know what happens after an oil change? Is the oil just burned, or even worse, buried, possibly poisoning ground water for years to come? Or is it properly disposed of in an incinerator that reaches temperatures that are high enough to prevent hazardous fumes to be formed?
• Legal liability In many countries where we work, there are strict laws surrounding disposal of drugs (especially psychotropic drugs), and ‘losing’ drugs in the reverse supply chain can open us to legal liability. Similar issues arise around environmental damage.
• Loss of reputation Although there is still not much press attention for aid and global health organisations’ records when it comes to the effects I mentioned above, I don’t think it will be too long before our actions in this area will be put under the microscope as well (as they should be). Do you really want your organisation to be the first of the black sheep that will be singled out for our atrocious reverse logistics practices?

It is clear that we need to start working on our reverse logistics. It should not be too hard: the basic principles and best practices that we use in ‘normal’, forward logistics, can be used in reverse logistics too. The only question is: do we start working on this now or will we wait until it is too late?

• World Vision is looking for two global supply chain management specialists, and a commodity director – multi-year assistance of health, nutrition and agriculture for Bangladesh.
• UNICEF is looking for a health consultant, cold chain and logistics system strengthening countries support in West Africa.

[Image: Job opportunities by Coffeechica]

The day, water, sun, moon, night – I do not have to purchase these things with money.

- Plautus

Was Plautus ever wrong.

It seems that it has been quite a while since I have written about the logistics of daily life, so let’s have a look at the logistics of what must count as the most daily of our needs: water.

First a truism: water is heavy. Just try to haul around 90 litres of the stuff and you will totally agree with me. In fact, it is so heavy that carrying it can lead to severe health problems. E.g., a 2003 Lancet article describes how 30-40 percent of a rural Tibetan population suffered from chronic back pain (a severe condition in a predominantly non-mechanised agrarian society), before an intervention aimed at correct carrying techniques and the building of ‘back-happy tap-stands’ (no, I really didn’t make that up – see the picture to the right to get an idea what it looks like).

In the developed world, we use this really nifty invention for our water logistics: pipes, a technology that has served us well for more than 2000 years (although one shouldn’t underestimate the amount of lead poisoning it has caused over the years – there are theories that it even contributed to the downfall of the Roman empire, although they are unlikely to be correct). For the moment, though, it is unlikely that water infrastructure will come any time soon to the remote areas of least-developed countries: the average Tibetan or Ethiopian subsistence farmer will still need to haul their water from a backbreaking distance.

That is why the hippo roller is such a great idea: by transforming the container itself into a wide wheel-like contraption, 90 litres of water at a time can be dragged around with a lot less effort: those 90 kilograms of water suddenly seem to weigh a lot less, and of course it can be transported much more hygienically than in an open container. So is it all downhill work from here?

Of course not. Even the hippo roller has some drawbacks that need to be worked on. Probably the most important one is… well, you guessed it, it is logistics. To make this a winning proposition, hippo rollers really should be produced close to where they are used, instead of shipped halfway across the globe: one of the litmus tests for the appropriateness of technology is whether it is feasible to produce it locally. A second issue is penetration: up to now, around 30,000 of them have been distributed, which is (if you allow me a very lame pun) nothing but a drop of water in the ocean. Such small numbers mean that it we really don’t have enough experience yet to know whether it really is such a good idea as it seems to be. It also means that there is no hippo-roller-repair man in every village, which means that it is unclear what happens with damaged rollers; and as I haven’t been able to find any evaluations yet, I really don’t know how long the average roller holds up in real life, or how easy it is to repair when it does get damaged.

Still, it is a good example of how creative thinking about logistics can help us to come up with ideas that will help the majority world immensely – and of how important logistics is for the daily life of all of us.

[Images: tap stand from the article by Hoy, Toole, Morgan & Morgan; uphill Hippo rolling by Project H Design. Some or all rights reserved.]

• Oxfam is looking for a regional logistics & administration coordinator for the Horn, East & Central Africa region and a logistics coordinator for Congo (DRC).
• MSF-Spain is looking for country logistics coordinators for various countries (but why, oh why do they advertise this on Reliefweb but not on their own site?).
• GOAL is looking for an assistant regional logistics manager, based in Nairobi (Kenya)
• Médecins du Monde is looking for a logistics coordinator for the NWFP (Pakistan); an admin/finance/logistics coordinator for Congo (DRC); and a logistician-administrator for Eastern Djebel Mara (Sudan).
• Medair is looking for a logistics support officer for their HQ in Switzerland.

[Image: Job opportunities by Coffeechica]

But this time I found myself frowning, and actually disagreeing vehemently. In his latest article on “rules to live by”, he writes:

Don’t overdo “process.” Yessssssssssssss, process is important. But process is not the actual point of aid work. The point is product, output, outcomes, impacts, benefit to beneficiaries… [INSERT PREFERRED AID-WORLD BUZZWORD]. If your process doesn’t lead to one of those in fewer steps than you have fingers, then it is probably useless and should be fixed or abandoned immediately.

And then:

Don’t overdo “participation.” Sometimes less is more when it comes to group decisions and group-led processes. If you can make the decision, make it. If you must involve others: Involve the lowest number of people practical for operational decisions. Involve only technicians and/or those with direct managerial authority over the project in question on technical decisions.

Of course, of course J. is right that outcomes are more important than process – but I think he overstates his case when it comes to the simplicity of the process. By total coincidence, I posted a response yesterday on humanitarian.info in which I said, “… if your solution can be written on a postcard, it probably solves nothing”. This was the summation of a four-paragraph argument that silver bullets don’t exist, that we need to look at systems as a whole when searching for solutions to issues, and that consequently those solutions will hardly ever be simple. To put it another way: we don’t live in a Hollywood movie; our problems will not be resolved in two hours in a script that can be gleaned from a one-page summary.

It all comes back to what I wrote in my post about ICT versus systems: if you want progress, you will need to do much more than just introduce yet another tool or another procedure – you will need to tackle the system, and on the whole systems don’t respond too well to short, sharp shocks. And all this with the caveat that, yes, of course there will be complex issues that can be resolved in a simple manner – but not that many.

Similarly, although I agree totally that one shouldn’t ‘overdo’ participation, I think that J.’s rules of thumb (“If you can make the decision, make it. If you must involve others: Involve the lowest number of people practical for operational decisions. Involve only technicians and/or those with direct managerial authority over the project in question on technical decisions.”) are overly simplistic. Yes, of course I keep the final responsibility as the manager in charge, but I can use inclusive process^[1] to:

• build consensus, which will make my life much easier when finally implementing what needs to be implemented – and in many cases actually lead to an increase of effectiveness and efficiency, because the time spent on participation is outweighed by the time saved on implementation;
• get feedback in an early stage that can make the difference between doing something stupid or doing something smart – and so improve our product/outcomes/impacts/benefit to beneficiaries/whatever. In other words: sometimes the street sweeper knows more about how to deal with autumn leaves than the dendrologist.

And now go and add Tales from the Hood to your feed reader – because J.’s writing shows that he doesn’t take his own advice on simplicity too seriously and really thinks about what he does; and that is a treat that is all too rare in the testosterone and adrenaline filled world of humanitarian aid.

[Images: simplicity by Gisela Giardino; Participation 12 pack by dharmabumx. Some rights reserved.

Back to post [1] Okay, so I have to admit that I have thrown that one in purely to be provocative. Can I have a bit of fun sometimes?

• The IFRC is looking for a logistics unit manager for Panama, a head of support services for the Africa zone (based in Johannesburg), a systems and processes officer for their HQ (Geneva), and a trainee logistics delegate for the Asia Pacific zone (based in Kuala Lumpur).
• Crown Agents are looking for a procurement specialist, a senior procurement specialist, and a procurement agent manager/team leader for Jordan; an SCMS ART logistics advisor for Botswana; a customs expeditor/logistics specialist and a procurement specialist for Ethiopia; and a procurement specialist, a senior procurement specialist, and a procurement agent manager/team leader for Moldova.

• TOFKAIS (The Organisation Formerly Known as IDA Solutions, a.k.a. i+solutions) organises various courses in medical supply management throughout 2010. See their training program 2010 for further information.
• A new book about humanitarian, aid and emergency logistics is being prepared, and a call for proposals for chapters is out.
• The Nordic Logistics Research Network (NOFOMA) has planned its annual conference for June 2010, and there will be a cluster on supply chain management for humanitarian logistics. Have a look at the call for papers.

My previous article about I-See technology was the first post on what looks to become a mini-series on logistics information management; it gave me some fresh ideas for new posts, and why not go with the flow when you’re on a roll?^[1]

This one will be about logistics data and what to do with it. Hello, are you still there?

A couple of years back, I was asked to analyse and improve on a supply line for an international NGO in an East-African country.^[2] My first obvious question was: how bad is it actually? They didn’t know: although everybody knew that hardly anything was delivered on time and that there were a lot of mistakes in order fulfilment, leading to frequent stock-outs and overstocks, nobody could really give me any hard data – it was all seat-of-the-pants. When I asked what caused the problems, and where in the supply line they occurred, I was told that that was why I was hired, and could I please get on with the job?

By the time I left, I was told that the supply line had never worked as well as it did, and that I had done a sterling job; but had I?

I think it is time to let the cat out of the bag on that one: in fact, the supply line hadn’t improved a bit – at least, after I started measuring things, my indicators remained fairly flat. In fact, they showed that the supply line really didn’t do that badly even before I arrived, taking into account the context.

What did change, though, was that I used the increased supply chain visibility to give useful feedback to field managers, both logistical and operational ones. For the first time, they would know when to expect their supplies, and would be informed at an early stage if things seemed to go off-track; which meant that they could plan for it and start taking contingency measures at an early stage. I also started to churn out regular one-page overviews of how the supply chain was actually doing, which showed nicely that we didn’t do too badly. Of course I presented this as a big improvement: nobody wants to be told that they were actually quite wrong.

Now this is a nice story, but how would this have helped me if, in fact, the supply chain had been the shambles people thought it was? Having increased visibility would at least have helped me to find out where exactly in the supply line the problems occurred, and perhaps even what caused them; it would also have enabled me to see whether my remedies worked, and to which extent – it would even allow me to try out various measures, and see which one (or which combination) worked best. And finally, it would possibly have helped me to argue my case when expensive or painful measures would have been necessary.

All this turned out to be moot, and I got kudos for what was a fairly easy job. Want those kudos too? Then start working on your supply chain visibility.

[Image: Kudos Buddy by Adam Fagen. Some rights reserved.]

Back to post [1] I just love mixing my metaphors. It’s like those chemistry experiments I did in school, with sometimes similarly interesting (or malodorous) effects.
Back to post [2] Sorry, can’t be more specific than that.

Does your organisation currently have an IC technology project running that aims to improve the supply chain? Odds are that it has, or has had one in the recent past, or is planning one for the near future – that is, if your organisation is anything bigger than a couple of volunteers with a budget of a couple of hundreds of thousands of euros. And you should: continuous improvement of your supply chain is a necessity, and ICT is indispensable to do so.

Or rather, you shouldn’t.

Too often, ICT is implemented as a stand-alone solution for supply line problems. ICT is indispensable to support any but the most trivial of supply lines, but rarely is it a solution by itself for whatever are your supply chain woes.

Does this sound like a truism to you? In fact, it does to me – but I have seen several of these ICT-as-a-panacea projects in aid logistics, so I think it is fair to say that apparently not everybody agrees. Oh, of course management of these projects will pay lip service to the idea that processes, attitudes, knowledge and training, and many other aspects will need to improve too, but in reality you see that everything concentrates on the technological solution: processes are adjusted around the technology, staff are trained in using the technology, and so on. And there we go again, in a straight line towards the next round of ‘technological innovation’.

ICT can help us to build systems that help us get the right information, at the right time, to the right people, at the right price, to make the right decisions and take the right actions. (Sounds familiar? It should.)

But: the operative word here is ‘system’. No, I am not talking about computer systems – when I say system, I refer to (ahem) ’a coordinated whole of human, physical and organisational resources (including procedures and structure), striving for a common goal’. In other words: your logistical department is only just part of the organisation’s logistics system (striving for logistical effectiveness and efficiency), which in its turn is part of the system that is your organisation as a whole (striving to perform whatever is its stated mandate as effectively and efficiently as possible), which in its turn… you get the idea. What is not a system is the shiny new ERP software that your director of resources has just bought after a slick demonstration; it could be part of an effective and efficient system – or it could break it.

I said it before and I will say it again: information and communications technology are indispensable to run anything but the most trivial supply lines; but it is there to serve the goal of those supply lines, and not the other way around. Technology should be part of an integrated system with more or less clearly defined goals. The systems should not be built around the technology, because that will hardly ever lead to real integration; instead technology, procedures, and people should be seen as a indispensable parts of the whole system, giving us eyes to see what is coming – I-see technology instead of IC technology.

(Image: Airborne Caffeine Delivery System by Todd Lappin. Some rights reserved.)

• GOAL is looking for an assistant country director, systems for Ethiopia, an assistant country director, operations for Sudan, a logistics officer for Kenya, and logistics coordinators for Sierra Leone and Uganda.
• MERLIN is looking for a logistician for their programmes in Kenya and Somalia (based in Nairobi) and a logistics coordinator for Sudan. They’re also still looking for logistics coordinators for ‘Africa’; perhaps somebody should explain to them that Africa is not a country.
• Solidarités is looking for logistics coordinators for Kenya/Somalia, Chad, and the Central African Republic; a base manager/logistician for Bunia (DRC); an administrative/logistics coordinator for Zimbabwe; and a base manager/logistician/administrator for Walikalé (DRC).

Let me not mince words here: I am disappointed. Expectations are high when a prestigious university like INSEAD releases a book under its own impressum, but those expectations are not met – not even closely. The reason actually is made clear in the first paragraph of the book. The authors describe their experience in humanitarian logistics on which they base the book: case studies they did for WFP/UNJLC, the IFRC, and FUNDESUMA. In other words, they base a book about humanitarian logistics in general on limited experience with three organisations that are very unrepresentative of the sector as a whole. This has clear effects throughout the book: although they do make some valid observations (especially when they talk about partnering with the private sector, which is clearly their focus), much of what they describe is over-simplified, or even dead wrong.

All three of the organisations they worked with (especially the IFRC and FUNDESUMA) have a focus on disaster aid, which obviously skewed their view severely. It leads to occasionally ridiculous assertions; a good example is that, according to Tomasini and Van Wassenhove, in humanitarian supply chains “… time cycles are very short [and] new and unprecedented demands occur frequently …” (p. 8). Definitely true in some types of humanitarian response – specifically disaster response – but totally untrue of many other types. When the authors describe the characteristics of a humanitarian supply line (ch. 1), they very clearly have a specific type of humanitarian response in mind; a type of response that in reality makes up a minority of humanitarian work.

Chapter 5, which is devoted to information management (which people who know me will immediately recognise as one of my personal hobby horses), goes as far as basically describing the SUMA model (with a bit of info about UNJLC’s website thrown in for good measure) as the paradigm to follow, without recognising that it is totally inappropriate for a majority of humanitarian aid work. A bit of scrutiny of e.g. humanitarian.info would have been useful to inform this chapter.

The book comes into its own in chapter 7, about partnerships between humanitarian and corporate organisations. It is very obvious that this is what the authors are experts in, and it is the most useful and well-written chapter of the book. Sadly, that is not enough to justify its rather inflated price.

All in all, this is a missed chance. Gentlemen, I just know you can do better: get to it.

• The International Rescue Committee is looking for a senior logistics coordinator for Congo (DRC), a logistics volunteer for Liberia, and logistics coordinators for Liberia and South Sudan.
• Médecins du Monde are looking for a security and logistics manager for Congo (DRC) and a logistics coordinator for Sudan.
• The International Medical Corps (IMC) is looking for a logistics coordinator for Liberia.
• ACTED is looking for an assistant logistics coordinator for Congo (DRC), a logistics support intern for their HQ in France, and a country logistics manager for Chad.

[Image: Job opportunities by Coffeechica]

Warning: serious business in a very silly disguise ahead.

You will of course remember that logistics is all about the five rights: getting the right goods, in the right quantity, to the right location, at the right time, at the right price. (And if you don’t, you could read all about it in my March article on the five rights.)

But now imagine the following scenario (perhaps a bit too literally a scenario, but please humour me).

You are the logistics coordinator for a nutritional NGO in the Kingdom of Far Far Away. After a rather nasty little conflict about a swamp, large groups of displaced people have moved to the edges of the disputed area, where spontaneous IDP camps have appeared. As there is hardly any food available there, levels of malnutrition rise alarmingly (and there there have even been some unconfirmed cases of cannibalism amongst one of the tribes, the Jinjabredmen). Your NGO has decided to intervene and you are tasked with finding sufficient amounts of the local staple, faerivloss.

You have two possible sources for the faerivloss:

1. You can buy it in the capital for about 200,000 shrec/MT (about $800/MT). Transport by local truck (affectionately called ‘donkeys’ because of their usually greyish colour, their ability to where even stallions can’t, and their drivers’ propensity for Eddie Murphy impersonations) will cost you an additional 30,000 shrec/MT.
2. You can get the faerivloss for free from the local sub-office of WFG (the World’s Fairy Godmother) who just received an enormous donation of the food from the Republic of Dizneeland (halfway across the globe). The donation is sitting in warehouses in the main harbour, but the government of Dizneeland offers to transport it for free to the IDP camps using a number of MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopters, stationed on a carrier just of the coast.

Not a difficult choice, isn’t it? Both options give you the right goods, in the right quantity, at the right location, at the right time; but the donation gives it to you for a price that is much righter than the locally bought goods. So you quickly fill in the WFG requisition forms and go off for a beer.

A couple of years later, you return to Far Far Away as part of your organisation’s emergency team. Although the IDP’s have all returned home after the resolution of the conflict and the accession of the new king (as the result of the unfortunate anuration of the old one), the region again is in the grip of a famine, and you quickly find out why: after the importation of massive amount of free faerivloss, the price on the local markets collapsed and the local farmers were forced of their land (and have moved to giant slums in the capital, where they joined the former donkey drivers, who now try to make a precarious living by driving taxis or, if they are lucky, work as drivers for the numerous NGOs that have made their base there). Most of the land lies fallow, and there will be no faerivloss harvested for the second year in a row. Complicating matters is that the local harbour is rendered largely unusable due to a number of very destructive hurricanes – probably the result of global warming.

Suddenly you get a sinking feeling in your stomach; similar to what you felt when, as a five-year-old, you pulled the tail of what you thought was the neighbour’s cat, but turned out to be some strange feline wearing boots and a rapier, speaking Spanish-accented English.

Of course, in reality our decisions will normally not have such dramatic consequences – but each of our decisions could have smaller but still noticeable negative consequences. When you import goods from overseas, you will have an impact on the local economy, and transport will have an impact on the global environment. And, of course, the fact that your NGO does not need to pay for the donated goods or their transport, does not mean that those costs have not been incurred.

Normally it is not up to us logisticians to make the decision whether we would forego a possible advantage for our organisation, based on wider-ranging considerations like climate change or economic consequences. However, it is up to us to make the people who do take these decisions aware of the possible consequences of our logistical choices, and ensure that they know that there is more than just the one option.

• The HUMLOG Group organises a practitioner workshop on “Private and NGO/GO Collaboration in Emergency Situations and Development” in Jönköping, Sweden, on 24 November.
• The 8th Heinz Nixdorf Symposium has a track on humanitarian logistics. It will be held next year April in Paderborn. Papers can be submitted until 15 November. (H/T to the HUMLOG newsletter).
• ‘Vince Lombardi’ Polak on design for the other 90%. Seems to me that we don’t do too much of that in logistics.

At times, the best training you can give people is a game, and that is especially true of logistics.

There are quite a number of counter-intuitive issues in logistics. Probably the most famous one is the Forrester (or whiplash) effect: forward prediction of demand in separate links in the supply chain will often lead to increasing cycles of alternate over- and under-stocks that travel through the chain like the undulations in a cracking whip. In other words: in a situation in which you do not have sufficient information about what happens further down the chain (as is so often the case), trying to look into the future can actually damage reliability and efficiency. Or to put it even more succinctly: don’t try to be smart when your ignorant.

So looking ahead can be bad for you? How is that for being counter-intuitive?

I am not going to explain here why this happens. Instead, I am going to ask you to play a game with a couple of your mates. Each of you is responsible for a link in the production and distribution of beer (hmmmm… how about Mountain Goat?), within a couple of rules – the most important one being that you are not to talk with each other, but only communicate by purchase orders and invoices. Sounds almost like the real world, doesn’t it? I mean, how often do you sit around a table with all supply managers in the full supply chain to see what each of you expects to happen next month?

Setting up the game and organising a play takes a bit of organisation, but luckily there is an online version, graciously run by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (who else?). So get a group of mates or colleagues online and play the game – and be astounded by the results. Please do so before reading on after the fold.

So, have you played the game? Then the results as they are explained here by prof. John Sterman should look familiar. Did you expect this to happen? Highly unlikely, unless you had some previous logistics training or have been confronted by the Forrester effect before, either in a game or in real life – or are a natural-born operations research genius, in which case I would love to work with you.

There are two things to notice here. One is that the Forrester effect is only one of a number of very counter-intuitive issues in supply line management; and people who think that you can work large-scale logistics without some understanding of the underlying dynamics and (gasp!) mathematics will find themselves running a supply chain that is either completely unreliable or highly ineffective – probably both. What’s even worse: they would probably not even notice it.

Now please note that I am not saying that we should only use logisticians with an advanced degree in logistics and operations research (although I think having more of these people would be a great thing, for various reasons); but I do maintain that you will need to do a lot of reading on the subject if you ever want to run any supply line that is even marginally larger than your local clinic in a manner that is both effective and efficient. Of course, if you don’t care that you cause regular stock-outs, or that you continuously need to destroy expired drugs that have been lying around in your warehouse for mountain goat’s… ermmm, donkey’s years, than you can forget about all that; but in that case, why are you reading this blog?

The second point to make is that, actually, it is not really necessary to know any of the underlying dynamics and (gasp!) mathematics. Am I contradicting myself here? Not really: you can gain some understanding of the two without having knowledge of it. Just having been confronted by e.g. the Forrester effect in a game is a powerful experience that you will not easily forget, even if you don’t know your regression from your integration; and it will easily teach you the importance of knowing at the start of the supply chain what is happening at its end. Few people who have played the beer game will forget the importance of demand communication throughout the chain, even if they have never heard of kanban or action triggers.

Prof. Sterman’s description of games like these as “flight simulators for management education” is a very good analogy; after all, most flight simulators these days live as games on home computers, even though they started as a safe and cheap way of training pilots. And remember, ‘safe and cheap’ here is ‘safe and cheap as opposed to crashing plane after plane until you get the hang of it’ – which, for some reason, is what we insist on doing in aid logistics.

Now please excuse me; I have a nice, cool glass of beer waiting for me. Mountain Goat, of course.

[Photo credits: Mountain Goat Beer Hightail Ale by Richard Giles; Interior cockpit of a twinjet flight simulator, courtesy of NASA.]

All you programme managers, country directors, and other people managing aid programmes out there: how often do you integrate logistics planning into your planning from day 1 of your design phase? (And if any of you say: “always”, please let me know when you need an experienced logistics manager – I would just so love to work for you. Not that I would believe you, of course, unless you are a logistician by background yourself – and even then I would be sceptical.)

An old post by Diane Bennett on the Aid Watch blog tells a cautionary tale of what happens when you don’t integrate logistics into your planning. It is a seven-year history of how a lack of logistics planning caused thousands of deaths in remote South Sudan; not because the logistics weren’t thought of, but because they weren’t integrated into the programme from the start.

A medical NGO who wants to support a vaccination will have to take into account how to get the vaccines on the spot – and finding out much later that “… vaccines were available … at a regional distribution center, a $5000 air charter flight away” is too late. If UNICEF and WHO want to ensure vaccination on the spot, they will also need to ensure transportation to it, and possibly refrigeration there. All these should be planned from the start, because this tale clearly demonstrates how taking logistics on at a later stage will only lead to disaster.

But possibly the biggest issue here is that none of the three organisations involved really did their homework. Measles vaccines are fairly heat tolerant. If they would have been transported to the site in a cold box, and then used within a couple of days or even weeks (depending on the ambient temperature), no refrigeration at all would have been necessary. This technique, known as the ‘fast chain’, has been in use for some time and is endorsed by WHO; but apparently nobody managed include this in the planning.

The tale shows only one thing: include logistics and logisticians in your planning from the start, and you will sleep a lot better at night. And don’t we all want that?