The humanitarian side of ops management

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When a city volunteers to host the Olympic Games, it not only invites tremendous economic opportunity, but it takes on a massive logistical challenge. They start building new public infrastructure, sporting venues, and services for the thousands of tourists and athletes about to arrive for the spectacle.

Humanitarian logistics are similar, explained Harwin de Vries, Associate Professor of Technology and Operations Management at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University. The difference is you don’t know where and when the event will take place, or how many people will be affected.

Despite these unknowns, humanitarian organisations are expected to prepare for when disaster strikes – and to do it cheaply.

“This is the situation they are facing,” said de Vries.

On the McGill Delve podcast, he sat down with Anicet Fangwa, Assistant Professor of Strategy and Organisation at McGill University, to discuss the challenges and opportunities for innovation in humanitarian ops management.

While there are many possible ways to improve the delivery of humanitarian aid, they require working within tight constraints and unpredictable conditions. They also require careful evaluation to ensure the benefits of implementation outweigh the costs.

Walking a tightrope

Professor Fangwa said humanitarian organisations often must cope with three sources of pressure. Civil society wants them to support as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. Governments and donors expect them to meet certain metrics to justify their funding. And they’re expected to do this with shrinking budgets.

“This, in humanitarian work, health, and development, is typical,” said de Vries. “You have multiple objectives, and there are trade-offs.”

Serving a maximum number of people is a noble goal, but it doesn’t always lead to maximum effectiveness of an intervention. Such was the case in South-East Africa, where Professor de Vries and his co-authors sought to optimise a roadside healthcare network aimed at truck drivers.

Truck drivers in this region often carry contagious diseases with little or no access to doctors while they’re working. Clinics can help, but serving a mobile population like this one comes with a slew of other challenges. Some treatments require repeat visits to the doctor – how do you ensure continuity of care when your patient is constantly on the move? There’s also the issue of staffing, ensuring that each clinic has enough supplies, and doing it all on a tight budget.

When faced with such constraints, it’s important to be realistic about what’s doable. In some cases, managers can find a solution that’s effective from an outcomes, budgetary, and logistics perspective, said de Vries.

“In many cases, the solution space is very big,” he said. “But in certain types of contexts, it’s simply okay to prioritise one of the objectives.”

Putting the ‘human’ in humanitarian

Big companies like Amazon are known for their innovative logistics operations, powered by robust data and decision-making algorithms. And they’re becoming more efficient every day. These technological solutions might be helpful in the humanitarian sector as well – but what works for Amazon may not necessarily work for UNICEF, explained de Vries.

Humanitarian organisations face vastly different conditions compared to multinational companies. Decision-making is often decentralised, the information needed to make decisions is often only available on the ground, there’s often a dearth of data that could inform algorithmic decision-making, and there’s a need for flexibility and improvisation due to the unknown unknowns of any given situation.

This gives a lot of decision-making power to on-the-ground humanitarian workers: they rely on their experience and intuition to make decisions. Compared to many private enterprises, where decision-making is centralised and there’s ample data available on their operations, this is a very different way to work.

“It’s completely the opposite,” said de Vries.

The conditions of humanitarian work and its decentralised approach to decision-making make 100 per cent efficiency near impossible to achieve, he said. Not because of any shortcomings of humanitarian workers, but simply because their work is so different.

Does that mean they shouldn’t chase operational enhancements? No. But it does mean that any tech-driven optimisations should be carefully evaluated before implementation, to ensure they support current decision-making structures rather than replace them.

“That’s the key,” said de Vries. “Align with whatever the culture and decision-making context rather than replace it.”

On the McGill Delve podcast, Professors de Vries and Fangwa further discuss the opportunities and challenges of humanitarian logistics. Search “McGill Delve” wherever you download podcasts.