Humanitarian supply chains put into perspective

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the September-October 2019 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

September-October 2019

It’s that time of year again, when we feature the Top 25 supply chains from Gartner. What I enjoy most about this research is the window it provides into where supply chains are going next: After all, while some lead, the rest of us follow.

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When Supply Chain Management Review was invited to join the advisory board for “USC’s Annual Global Supply Chain Excellence Summit,” organizers suggested that we help them examine the complexity of today’s humanitarian supply chains by speaking with several key practitioners. In the roundtable discussion I moderated, three prominent leaders shared their impressions of the current state of this dynamic industry sector.

Kathy Fulton is the executive director of the American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN), which responds with logistical support to overseas destinations and our own domestic emergencies. Benjamin Labrot is the Founder and CEO of Floating Doctors, a nonprofit organization out of California that provides free medical care to remote villages and communities in Central America reached mainly by boat. Susy Schöneberg is head of Flexport.org, which recently forged a new partnership with MedShare, leveraging reverse logistics to recycle medical supplies and equipment.

Supply Chain Management Review: What are the greatest challenges you are facing this year?

KATHY FULTON: ALAN faces similar challenges to many other organizations—the uncertainty of demand caused by disasters, and the uncertainty of supply due to geography or market conditions. In disaster relief, you don’t know when or where your help will be needed, or to what extent. It is hard to get good analytics or predictable demand when disasters by nature are unpredictable. And because we rely on the supply chain community to donate their services or expertise to fulfill our mission, there can be a great deal of variability depending on geography and market conditions.

BENJAMIN LABROT: I agree with Kathy. Our greatest supply chain challenges this year are a “perfect storm“ of factors including constantly changing pharmaceutical approvals in multiple countries. Then there is the volatility of importation laws and a very high inconsistency in enforcement. Finally, there’s the high cost of shipping quantities of medication and clinical supplies for our nonprofit medical mission team, now that we have achieved a certain level of capacity. Our organization still has many characteristics of a small “mom and pop” operation, yet has a gross revenue of just under $1 million per year and provides care for over 10,000 patients annually.

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