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1. Introduction and purpose
Where is the Crisis Management Component of [Humanitarian Operations]?
(Starr and Van Wassenhove, 2014, p. 934).
This paper links humanitarian logistics (HL) and humanitarian operations (HO) to supply chain risk management (SCRM). Extant research is concerned with differences between commercial and humanitarian supply chains (Dubey and Gunasekaran, 2016; Oloruntoba and Kovács, 2015), but has concluded that concepts, models, and tools can be applied in the humanitarian context as well (Day et al., 2012; Maon et al., 2009; Oloruntoba and Gray, 2006; Swanson and Smith, 2013; van Wassenhove, 2006). SCRM was developed for the commercial context and is concerned with assessing, mitigating, responding to and monitoring normal and abnormal risks (disruptions) (cf. Ho et al., 2015). The present paper focusses on mitigation, with the aim of providing an initial understanding of humanitarian organisations’ use of supply chain strategies (SCS) to improve their logistics preparedness. Better preparedness improves response (Van Wassenhove, 2006; Jahre and Heigh, 2008; Jahre, Kembro, Rezvanian, Håpnes, Ergun and Berling, 2016; Scholten et al., 2014), even if there are challenging trade-offs between cost efficiency and flexibility (Day, 2014; Jahre and Fabbe-Costes, 2015; UNDP, 2015). SCRM also points to trade-offs between different types of risk such as return on investments in safeguarding against disruptions (e.g. Sodhi and Tang, 2012; Nooraie and Parast, 2016).
Research on logistics preparedness mainly concerns network design and warehouse location for prepositioning of goods (Kunz and Reiner, 2012), a focus also seen in practice (Jahre, Pazirandeh, and Van Wassenhove, 2016). Prepositioning can be viewed as strategic stock and is only one among many strategies suggested in the SCRM literature. Accordingly, this paper questions the implicit (in-house, cf. Alvesson and Sandberg, 2011, p. 254) assumption in much HL/HO literature that strategic stock is the (only) mean by which organisations can mitigate risks. Using SCRM theory we see logistics preparedness as robust logistics strategies (Tang, 2006a) and identify alternatives to prepositioning, contributing to understanding how the humanitarian community can improve its logistics preparedness and thereby response.
While SCRM is a vastly expanding area (Colicchia and Strozzi, 2012; Ho et al., 2015), few studies have linked it with HL. McLachlin et al. (2009) suggested that SCRM is important in the humanitarian context for two...