A Logistician's Plea

Submitted by John Rickard on September 3, 2003 - 12:00am.

As a logistician, have you ever first learned of a new project when the purchase requisitions appeared on your desk? Or received a vehicle request 20 minutes before it was urgently required? If so, take comfort from knowing that you are not the first.

Smaller aid projects used to be implemented by managers wearing several hats. Given the scale of the operations, this was generally manageable. With limited number and close proximity of staff, planning was almost automatically coordinated. Now some projects involve dozens of staff and expenditures of millions of dollars - and the old ways no longer work. What can we do to set priorities, and establish the necessary management, administrative and collaborative structures?

There is a myriad of internal and external factors affecting our ability to plan and coordinate: poor or unreliable local infrastructure, rapidly changing market conditions, poor communications and security, fluid population movements, over-worked staff, short donor lead-times for proposals, donor regulations, institutional memory, inter-agency relations, staff turnover, staff capacity, and so on. These factors do make it difficult for managers to plan and coordinate. The problem is that in response, rather than review those elements that we can control, managers tend to de-prioritise the whole planning and coordinating process.

Working Together

At field and organisational levels we see programmes structured into Projects, Administration, Logistics and Financial Support (or minor variations thereof). This evolution is necessary to manage large programmes effectively but the support functions are often considered as appendages rather than integral elements of the whole. We need to find better ways of working together at all stages of the project lifecycle.

Supply Chain Management

As a community we are not unique and therefore we do not necessarily have to learn all new tricks the hard way. Many similar discussions took place in the private sector 15 years ago. To improve service and/or reduce costs, leading companies in manufacturing and retail focused on how they interacted with their suppliers and how they got their products to market. This is Supply Chain Management - what many of us call logistics.

Coordinated Planning

Are your proposals routinely reviewed by Finance and Logistics staff?

Greater chances of success can be built into the plan when writing your proposal. What are the procurement lead times? Are you sure about the warehousing and transportation infrastructure needs? Oversights at this stage can result in delayed project implementation and missed targets.

A procurement plan could be required as a supporting document for all project proposals.

Coordinated planning demonstrates understanding of what good logistics does and can offer: improved efficiency, contingency plans, accountability and reduced cost.

Coordinated Operations

Once a grant is approved, programme staff and logistics staff need to review and update their plans on a regular basis. A Grant Opening Meeting is a good start. A Mid-Point Review also helps to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Is the work proceeding as expected? Are there enough vehicles? Are materials being used at the projected rate? Are suppliers meeting their promised prices and lead times? There are a multitude of factors to take into account and no one department has all of the information and knowledge to make decisions in isolation.

The Benefits

There are significant improvements in efficiency to be made by the donor and aid community if we adopt best practices. We must be ready to take advice from experts and to invest in today's technology. Underpinning it all should be a solid flow of information within an integrated team, throughout project planning and implementation. It seems simple and rather obvious, yet it struggles to gain acceptance.

John Rickard is Director of Logistics for International Rescue Committee. The full version of this article appears in Forced Migration Review issue 18, published September 2003, entitled 'Delivering the goods: rethinking humanitarian logistics'. To access it online or to order a hard copy, visit the FMR website.