Logistics

Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’: herding river horses

by Michael Keizer on November 20, 2009

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.

image 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.]

{

Continue Reading 2 comments }Logistics, Public health

Latest job opportunities (November 19, 2009)

by Michael Keizer on November 19, 2009

[Image: Job opportunities by Coffeechica]

{

Continue Reading 0 comments }Aid and aid work, Logistics

Latest job opportunities (November 13, 2009)

by Michael Keizer on November 15, 2009

{

Continue Reading 0 comments }Aid and aid work, Logistics

Humourless links for November 14, 2009

by Michael Keizer on November 14, 2009

{

Continue Reading 0 comments }Aid and aid work, Logistics, Public health

Kudos, buddy! Or: how logistics information management will help you do your job

by Michael Keizer on November 12, 2009

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.

{

Continue Reading 7 comments }Logistics

Do you see? Technology aiding supply lines – or not

by Michael Keizer on November 11, 2009

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.)

{

Continue Reading 4 comments }Logistics

Latest job opportunities (November 10, 2009)

by Michael Keizer on November 10, 2009

{

Continue Reading 0 comments }Aid and aid work, Logistics

Book review: ‘Humanitarian logistics’ by Tomasini and Van Wassenhove – a missed chance

by Michael Keizer on November 9, 2009

If you have followed this blog, you will know that I am very much in favour of more academic input into our logistics efforts. As you can imagine, I was tickled pink when I saw the ads for a new book about humanitarian logistics, written by respected INSEAD academics Rolando Tomasini and Luk Van Wassenhove.

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.

{

Continue Reading 7 comments }Aid and aid work, Logistics

Latest job opportunities (6 November 2009)

by Michael Keizer on November 6, 2009

[Image: Job opportunities by Coffeechica]

{

Continue Reading 0 comments }Aid and aid work, Logistics

Not a fairy tale: when the five rights of logistics are not enough

by Michael Keizer on November 5, 2009

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.

{

Continue Reading 4 comments }Aid and aid work, Logistics, The light(er) side

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →