When Supply Chains Save Lives

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the January-February 2013 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

January-February 2013

Supply chain management has a host of rules that most managers live by. But in certain cases, say authors Robert Sabath and Rich Sherman, true innovation comes only when those conventional rules are broken. By clearly understanding the nature of the rules and the details of your supply chain, you can know where and when rule-breaking makes sense.

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Abdi Tadole was one of the lucky children. Prolonged drought had laid siege to crops and livestock and all those who depended on them in Abdi’s village in Northern Kenya. Abdi’s grandmother, desperately worried about the starving two-year-old, carried him 10 kilometers to a dispensary. And there he was diagnosed and nursed back to health with vitamins, antibiotics, and high-protein therapeutic food.

Amid continuing headlines about world hunger and food insecurity, there are, happily, more and more stories like Abdi’s. A large part of the reason for that is the recent development of ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF)—a rich paste made of peanuts mixed with milk powder, oil, sugar, and fortified with vitamins and minerals. The sticky paste, distributed in little foil packets, is specially formulated to revive children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM). It has brought back many from the brink, restoring them to relative health in just a few weeks. Indeed, many observers have credited the food with lowering mortality rates during times of famine.

Individual packaging of the therapeutic food allows easy handling and prevents contamination of the product between feedings. Mothers can take RUTF home and give it to the child there, rather than having the child spend time in a feeding center. In 2007, the use of this innovative “hit” product to address a major cause of elevated child mortality was endorsed by the United Nations, and demand took off.

But the other part of the story is the responsiveness and effectiveness of the nutrition supply chain— specifically, the ability of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to quickly bring and distribute RUTF to where it is most needed. Given the lumpy, “spiky” growing demand for the product, it requires an extraordinarily responsive supply base and supply chain to effectively meet that need. The task is especially tough because UNICEF has set a goal to include sourcing from countries where the product is used—countries in which local manufacturers face unique challenges.

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