Improving humanitarian logistics through action research - Disaster Relief Supply Chain Management

Humanitarian logistics is about disaster preparedness, response, and recovery, and accounts for 60-80% of total costs with huge improvement potential. Project objectives are to establish cooperation with US humanitarian logistics research centre(s). Build ing on action research, the project will develop pedagogical tools for forecasting demand in disasters and for mapping capacities in disaster prone countries, and test these with GaTech-, MIT- and other post-graduate students, followed by co-authored pape rs in scientific journals. Critical R&D challenges are the gap between practice and research in management, and discussions about relevance vs. rigour, in general and in logistics, operations ? and supply chain management specifically. Action research ca n be one solution to obtaining both relevance and rigor, but is a relatively recent approach in the field, literature reporting few studies. This in spite of being an area that should be particularly well suited, given that the point of action research is to experiment on real problems designed to assist in solution. Humanitarian logistics in particular lacks practical relevance and the literature does not report any action research. The main R & D challenge for the first study is that while practice reli es on needs assessment that have proven inadequate for the purpose of efficient planning and response, prevailing research claims that there is lack of data for demand forecasting. Our research will demonstrate that there is data and how it can be used fo r planning. For the second study, the main R & D challenge is to understand how disaster prone countries can prepare for disasters, building their own competence and capacity, and for what they need international assistance. Anticipated use of project fi ndings constitute the tools potential for improving practice and teaching. Results will contribute to more understanding of action research in humanitarian logistics in particular, and SCM & management in general.