Hi, I'm Rebecca Turner, Adjunct Professor of Logistics and Complex Humanitarian Emergencies at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory. I currently work for the Global Rapid Response Team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a field logistician. What does transport management mean for humanitarian logisticians? Well, it involves local transportation for team members, as well as transportation to the disaster relief site. Could also involve various means of transportation dependant upon multiple factors. In 2000, the United Nations used a convoy of 1,500 donkeys to deliver humanitarian assistance goods such as tents, blankets, and food to 5,000 families. Who had fled conflict in a remote and snowed-in area in northern Afghanistan, which was inaccessible by road vehicles. I actually did the same thing with vaccine in Haiti, but not to the scale of 1,500. So remember, it's good to be flexible when looking at transport options. For international operations, customs may present challenges. Active distribution plans are critical. Goods should be proactively distributed from the intermediate depots to use facilities like hospitals. So that the actual practitioners have the life saving materials when and where they're needed. To account for demand variability and movement of people, optimizing the inventory that's kept in the central warehouse versus the distribution centers can prevent costly transportation routes later on in the dispatch. Professional logisticians must continually assess opportunities with supporting partners and players who have access to different options for aircraft, trucks, trailers, storage facilities, and on-site security. Smart materials management can mean more efficient use of transportation costs. For example, kitting to package for functional purpose in advance. Medical kitting has been standardized in the humanitarian aid community to meet specific needs of healthcare providers while saving time and money on the supply chain side. However, in some cases kitting may be less appropriate and more inefficient. An example of this occurred in an international outbreak response. The clinician only requested a specific type of commodity. But because the international catalog only offered standardized kits for the specific disease, the organization did not have the option to solely purchase that item. Kitting in this case would have been a huge waste of donor money and supplies. The hum logi must always work out the cost benefit analysis before deciding how to proceed. Moving on to cold chain logistics. Ensuring that vaccines, medical supplies, and staff arrive on time and where they're needed requires an integrated system of equipment, people, policies, and procedures. This integrated system is called the cold chain. Challenges specific to cold chain include temperature sensitivity requirements, delays in transportation, electrical outages, customs delays, propane power versus the push for solar. Oftentimes, in the chaos that ensues after a disaster, logistics personnel are left to conduct response efforts with very few resources. It's important to allow staff the flexibility to maneuver the response, so that they can maximize their efforts, using the limited resources available on hand. The principle of bulk packing and bundling, as well as reverse transport, can aid in addressing resource challenges. For example, if a truck is earmarked for educational kits, the additional space available should be capitalized upon for other needed supplies going in the same direction as the educational kits. The logistician should inquire before the truck returns to the intermediate depot from the provincial level as to whether or not the field facility has any reverse logistics items which need to be returned to the main location. So that backloading can save on transportation costs. Important to the emergency response from a logistics perspective is coordination and collaboration of the delivery. In domestic and international disaster response, the need to coordinate and reduce duplication of efforts is the mantra of the professional humanitarian aid worker. Logistics, by its nature, is very structured. It could be really challenging as a foreign team to work within the existing logistics infrastructure and coordinate with other colleagues from other organizations. There's competition to be the first organization to deliver aid the fastest and to the most vulnerable. By delivering first, one meets the humanitarian imperative, but also positions his or her organization to do even more work by gaining additional funding. Being able to deliver without having a negative impact on the local economy is sometimes very difficult. As an international human aid worker and logistician, it's critical to observe some basic tenets of modern humanitarian aid response practices. First and foremost, your operations are subject to the laws of the sovereign nation in which you're operating. This means the host nation must grant access and permission to operate after they've made a formal request for international humanitarian assistance. The humanitarian aid community currently acknowledges the United Nations as the coordinating entity operating at the request of the host nation. For a humanitarian logistician, understanding the United Nations' cluster system is important. The clusters are groups of humanitarian organizations, UN and non-UN, working in the main sectors of humanitarian action. Logistics has interplay with all other clusters involved in the response. The health cluster is led by the World Health Organization, WHO. And the logistics cluster is led by the Word Food Program, WFP. A medical logistics professional should be on a first name basis with the cluster coordinator in the affected country for health and logistics. It's imperative that all actors, including the host nation, militaries, international aid organizations, private volunteer organizations, local aid organizations. Commercial logistics companies and freight forwarders cooperate within the humanitarian architecture to prevent duplication of efforts. The clusters do not operate as traditional command and control structures. So finesse to liaising is required for effective collaboration. NGOs, IOs, donors, militaries, and most importantly, the host nation, meet in hopes of sharing information, identifying resources, targeting the most vulnerable. And working together to quickly and effectively save lives and deliver aid. Oftentimes, there are various motivations of partners on an organizational and individual basis that can prove to be roadblocks to an effective response. Therefore, we should manage information flows within humanitarian supply chains to ensure successful logistics operations and lead to greater efficacy in our programs. Effective logistics management draws on the information flows running through the humanitarian supply chain. And ensures that they're proactive in achieving lines of communication for each phase of the response. Communication in humanitarian logistics can be more complicated than in the private sector. Because unlike traditional logistics that have unidirectional lines of communication. The humanitarian logistician has to facilitate communication between the donor, the internal requestor, the supplier, and the system or party taking action to support the request. This can prove difficult to manage. So, the logisticians who leverage the power of effective communication in an emergency response setting and manage it well in the field can make huge impacts. Whether you will be the logistician to deploy in the future or you'll play a greater role in planning and programming for international disaster response. I hope this session's given you some useful aspects of communication, procurement, transportation and shipping. Warehousing and storage, supply chain, inventory management, materials handling and distribution, as well as cold chain, from an operational perspective to consider in your future deployments. Thank you for your time and attention.
