Logistics

Latest job opportunities (February 28, 2010)

by Michael Keizer on February 28, 2010

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

[Image: Job opportunities by Coffeechica]

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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

A tricycle-truck in Liaocheng, by Frank StarmerAs 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.

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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.]

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Logistics questions around the Haiti earthquake

by Michael Keizer on January 16, 2010

Perhaps unsurprisingly (although it did surprise me, for reasons that I will explain later), I have received a lot of questions about the logistics of the Haiti response. Some of the most frequently asked questions, with a stab at some answers.

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.

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Latest job opportunities (January 11, 2010)

by Michael Keizer on January 11, 2010

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Humourless links for January 10, 2010

by Michael Keizer on January 10, 2010

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

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"Mailboxes" by Minesweeper @ Wikimedia

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).
Untitled by PACOM @ Flickr

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).]

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Humourless links for January 3, 2010

by Michael Keizer on January 3, 2010

Big h/t to the humlognews newsletter.

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The challenge of reverse logistics in global health

by Michael Keizer on January 2, 2010

The Valley of the Drums, a toxic waste dump in northern Bullitt County, Kentucky. This site was one of the reasons the the U.S. Superfund law was enacted.

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?

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Latest job opportunities (November 21, 2009)

by Michael Keizer on November 21, 2009

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