According to OCHA funding for Logistics Cluster activity for the Pakistan floods is still $5m short of the $15m requirement estimated. All the learning from recent humanitarian emergencies (from the Asian tsunami of 2004 to the Haiti earthquake earlier this year) shows how vital logistics coordination is to an effective response.
$15m is small as a proportion of the total requirement (about 3% of the total budget of $460m – the biggest ticket cluster being Food Security). More details from ReliefWeb.
Just a quick reminder that the Disasters Emergency Committee is still pushing for funds to help relieve the terrible situation in Pakistan.
The NGOs receiving DEC funding have highly developed and professional humanitarian logistics capabilities, which are vital to rapid and effective intervention.
Here is something very useful for humanitarian logisticians: the Logistics Operations Guide, or LOG for short, brought to you by the Logistics Cluster. But not only is it useful for those in the humanitarian sector, it is an excellent model for the clear communication of logistics know-how: succint, practical and well-referenced. (The big logo below is a link to the site.)
In the words of the website, the LOG is
a single source of best practices comprising of logistics templates, operational tools, references, and guidelines that should be of use to all humanitarian logisticians, regardless of the size of their organisation, or its area of specialisation. Specifically, the LOG targets all humanitarian logisticians deployed in ongoing operations and new emergencies.
The LOG is presented as a website, but importantly it can also be made accessible offline, either by downloading a Windows executable file, or by using Google Gears. (I tried the latter out on my Mac because it wouldn’t run the Windows file, and it worked perfectly.)
This means that staff deployed on operations can take a laptop with a full copy of the LOG website (and if they get to connect to the net they can pick up any updates). This is very neat, and the WFP IT people who put it together did a great job in selecting a Gears-enable CMS that supports this.
You can read more about the LOG at www.logcluster.org/tools/log or go directly to the LOG site log.logcluster.org. If you want to set it up on your laptop using Gears I recommend you read the technical guide pdf as the main site steers you towards the Windows exe file. If you get stuck drop me a note and I’ll clarify.
Now is clearly the time for reflection on the logistics operations during the response to the Haiti earthquake in January this year (see my posts on articles by Mike Whiting and Maggie Heraty).
Dr. Paul S. Auerbach is Professor of Surgery in the Division of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. A few days after the earthquake he joined the relief effort in Haiti via the International Medical Corps. He is an authority on wilderness medicine, useful for Ray Mears-style adventures, but also an incredible background for dealing with trauma cases in an emergency amid the shattered infrastructure of Haiti.
Everything I know about supply-chain management, I learned in the two weeks after the earthquake in Haiti.
Dr Auerbach is quite typical of the resourceful people who become involved in humanitarian logistics. They are full of energy, and often highly skilled in other disciplines, but they find that in order to get things done they need to learn about logistics. Dr Auerbach cites “space and supplies” as key problems, and his blog describes how he took responsibility for administration and medical logistics for the team. (He also notes that the team had to become plumbers and electricians too – there’s a great story of improvisation to get the job done.)
Dr Auerbach’s story is inspiring stuff, and to me it underlines the importance of the work Mike Whiting and many others have been doing with CILT’s HELP Forum (and at RedR) to improve the professionalism of humanitarian logistics. If the IMC had brought a logistics coordinator, more time would have been freed for surgeons to provide medical care. The toll of running the operation, practising medicine and learning about emergencies logistics all at once is clear in Dr Auerbach’s account – at one stage he collapsed and it took 9 litres of IV fluid to get him going again.
Do visit his blog and read the entries – they are informative, educational, and above all extremely humane.
More interesting stuff in Focus (shock, horror!) In the May 2010 edition Maggie Heraty describes what she saw and experienced while on mission with RedR. Maggie arrived in Haiti just over three weeks after the earthquake to identify training needs for NGO staff in the immediate disaster response phase, and longer term looking at recovery and rebuilding. This was a joint programme by RedR and the French NGO Bioforce and covered water, sanitation, shelter, site planning and other subjects, including of course logistics.
As with Mike Whiting’s article in April which I summarised last week, Maggie’s account makes clear the scale of the problem. She describes: people camped informally throughout the city; a government infrastructure so shattered that vehicle registration and testing was wiped out (leaving NGOs to drive vehicles with foreign or no number plates); Land Registry destroyed making it harder to take over new sites for formal camps.
The UN Cluster system under OCHA seems to have helped (where NGOs got took advantage of the clusters). The Logistics Cluster was well attended, though Maggie notes that Logs Cluster staff mostly struggled with the meetings that were held in French – Maggie’s too modest to mention she is a fluent French speaker herself. Where agencies didn’t join Cluster efforts, she notes, there was duplication of effort.
Good to see that technology was put to use (albeit with difficult comms infrastructure – satellite links creaking at busy times causing slow connections). Info was shared on Googlegroups; Google Earth updated with refreshed satellite pics and overlaid with coordinates of sites. United Nations Disaster Assessment Group (UNDAG) provided free wifi at the Log Base, as did Télécoms Sans Frontières.
Mike Whiting has written an excellent article on the emergency response to January’s Haiti earthquake in the April 2010 edition of Logistics and Transport Focus. My copy of Focus often languishes in the in-tray for a couple of weeks before I even get the plastic wrap off, but I’d urge all CILT members to read this article.
Mike gives an overview of the logistics systems that were put in place to support the relief and subsequent recovery operations. The scope of the challenge and the solutions that were designed an implemented against a ticking clock are actually quite inspiring.
But he also gives some very valuable background, particularly around learning in the profession and NGOs about improving the quality and effectiveness of the response. He refers to the 2008 ALNAP (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance) report on earthquakes.
Among the lessons from that report that caught my eye was the observation that “recovery operations are not neutral: they will reinforce or reduce existing inequalities and must be actively designed to do the latter”.
There was a good deal of criticism of the operations in Haiti at the time – particularly that things were slow to get started. Haiti is a very difficult place to work in – recent kidnappings of aid workers are just one example. Mike concludes his detailed and informed discussion of what actually happened with the judgement that:
Given the unique circumstances, the response was as good as one could realistically expect.
If you are a CILT member, you should be able to read the article online – look for volume 12, number 4, April 2010.
You can find the ALNAP report from their website (link above) or download the pdf here.
This came round on a Current Awareness Bulletin from CILT but the link was mangled – eventually I found the right site.
This is pleasingly low-tech: a google map with customised icons linked to some database info about each port or rail freight terminal. This is the multimodal map‘s own website.
This is what it looks like (quick screengrab, which also links to the site).
Screengrap from the multimodal map
Let’s hope they keep the info updated… It’s an easy reference for multimodal network planning (getting your port and rail links in the right place).
A lengthy post today that’s been in the pipeline for a while. The Lean Enterprise Institute have published an English translation of The Birth of Lean, recounting the experiences of the early Toyota practitioners, and how their experiences shaped what became Lean methods and thinking. The introduction and first chapter are available as a free download, and they are well worth looking at.
The review below is based entirely on that first chapter, an interview with Taiichi Ohno. I found it enlightening and thought-provoking, and it raises issues that are still relevant for improvement programmes today.
Kanban serendipity
Pull production by capping WIP is such a neat concept with far-reaching and consequences that I’ve often wondered whether it’s creation was something of an accident. Taiichi Ohno makes some comments that confirm my suspicion. At one point he places Kanban in the context of a general visual management approach: “We developed kanban … as a means of making the flow of work visible.”
He mentions another of the inspirations for using Kanban:
“A big reason for adopting kanban was our desire to reduce the administrative burden of running a factory. We were looking for ways to reduce paperwork.”
Flexibility in production planning was important too. The following sounds like something the Toyota team realised after they had got Kanban working:
“Here’s an example. Let’s say you need to revise your production plan. Working out all the necessary changes on a computer would take a couple of weeks, and you’d fall behind in your production control. Even if the computer could handle all the calculations in an instant, you’d still fall behind because accommodating the changes in the workplace would take time.
“With kanban, all you need to do is adjust the number of kanban in circulation in accordance with your needs. When kanban start arriving slower than people had expected, they understand immediately that the company has reduced the production plan. As long as you keep your production leveled, changes in the production plan will take effect the next day.”
Note that there’s nothing here about the prevention of WIP explosion and reduction of cycle times, the novel benefits of Pull. It’s just speculation, but I don’t think they played a part in the invention of the system. The only hint of something like that comes when Taiichi Ohno says that he “told people that the kanban were like money and that anyone who withdrew parts without depositing a kanban was a thief”. Read more »
Trying to present statistics in an interesting and engaging way is terribly challenging. In the supply chain world, we often have to communicate rather dry numbers that imply significant conclusions for how our business should be run.
This has been kicking around the internet for some time now, so apologies if you’ve seen it before. In 2006, Professor Hans Rosling gave the following presentation at TED. It’s primarily about international health and development, but it’s also a bravura display of communicating some complex numbers in a way that gets across a clear message.
You can play with the data and charts for yourself at gapminder.org.
It’s a classic technique: follow an order from receipt to fulfilment. Shapiro, Rangan and Sviokla wrote an influential article on the subject in HBR in 1992 (Staple yourself to an order).
Now, with more humour, a YouTube version. An outfit called Business Process Excellence in the US have posted an 8 minute animation on the theme. They’ve disabled embedding, so I can’t show it here, but here’s the link. Be aware, the puns are appalling.
