Influence of Supply Chain Leagility on Performance of Humanitarian Aid Organizations in Kenya

Abstract

In today's volatile and uncertain humanitarian environment, adopting a purely lean or a purely agile supply chain is not effective. Humanitarian organizations are struggling to obtain the highest possible performance from their supply chains by utilizing and adopting various supply chain designs. This is upon realization that despite the huge chunks of money pumped into humanitarian sector, stringent oversight by donors and expectations from vulnerable populations, humanitarian supply chains still respond in a sluggish, inefficient and poorly coordinated manner to emergencies. The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of supply chain responsiveness and waste management on performance of humanitarian aid organizations in Kenya. The underpinning theories and model in this study included; Decoupling Point theory; Theory of Constraints and SCOR model. Survey research design was employed for this study. The study entailed a census survey of all the 330 humanitarian aid organizations in Kenya with supply chain managers as the unit of observation. Questionnaires were used to collect primary data. Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics was used aided by SPSS version 24 to facilitate data analysis. The data was presented using a combination of statistical and graphical techniques. Trend analysis was used to spot a pattern on the sub-constructs of performance of humanitarian aid organizations for five years. The study findings revealed that supply chain responsiveness and waste management are positively associated with performance of humanitarian aid organizations. From the findings, most humanitarian aid organizations had knowingly or unknowingly partially implemented leagility design in their supply chains. The findings further showed that despite the rise in disaster resource allocation, the culture of preparedness was lacking in the country. Based on these findings and conclusions, the study recommended that to achieve and sustain an efficient and responsive supply chain, humanitarian aid organizations should design, implement and fully adopt leagility design in their humanitarian supply chains. Humanitarian aid organizations are recommended to embrace advanced technologies to improve their supply chain leagility. Donors on the other hand were encouraged to strengthen local capacity of affected communities and increase their funding on humanitarian aid operations. In addition, supply chain professionals should come up with new ways of predicting demand in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment learning from data from previous disasters. The study further recommends for a creation of a disaster preparedness plan that gives the way forward in times of tragedies or disasters.

Performance management process integration in humanitarian supply chains: focusing on the natural disaster preparedness stage

“…Analyzing/acting -finally, both HOs and donors claimed that they analyzed CE and LTE, and only HO2 did not conduct analyses for CE and LTE. The majority of HOs and donors believe that for the analysis/actions in the PM process to (Modgil et al, 2020), organizational protocol (Kiswili et al, 2021), standardization (Frennesson et al, 2021) and evaluation (Polater, 2021). In summary, HOs and donors implemented the PM process for each activity, which indicated their awareness that CE and LTE must be involved in PM in the preparedness stage.…”

“…However, it is not clear how performance measurement can lead to greater accountability (Beerens et al , 2020), and performance measurement in HSCs is not as developed as in CSCs (Abidi et al , 2020). Knowledge from CSCs cannot just be transferred but rather needs to be “contextualized” to fit to HSCs, as has been indicated by recent HSC studies; performance measurement is often context-based (Behl and Dutta, 2019; Behl et al , 2020; Kiswili et al , 2021; Anjomshoae et al , 2022; Dubey et al , 2022). The contextualization is based on the major problematizing differences between CSCs and HSCs, as HSCs have the goal of alleviating the suffering of vulnerable people, whereas CSCs have the goal of gaining competitive advantage (Negi and Negi, 2021).…”

“…There are unique elements in every HSC operation; in addition, HOs encounter complexity in the intangible nature of the services they offer, limited data availability, unknown outcomes and chaotic work environments, which prevent them from conducting performance measurement in HSCs (Patil et al , 2022). This results in a lack of CE and LTE (Kiswili et al , 2021; Dubey et al , 2022).…”

The Impact of Humanitarian Supply Chain on Non-Government Organizations Performance Moderated by Organisation Culture

“…They need to upgrade a flexible S.C. design to handle these difficult situations. Agility and flexibility are reaction time and responsiveness measures [43]. Therefore, flexibility is considered a prerequisite for agility.…”

“…For example, when humanitarian agencies involve their relief staff in identifying "disasteraffected victims" needs and interpreting those needs so they are successfully conveyed in HSC, dynamic capacities in HSC arise [37]. Recently, academics in logistics and SCM expanded the DCV outside enterprise limits in a way that considers complex S.C. capacities such as supply chain agility [40,43] and S.C. durability [49]. Dynamic sensing, stability, and speed are attractive SCAG properties [50,51].…”