Workshops

Many countries face similar supply chain challenges including bottlenecks in stock management, distribution, and information systems. These challenges, in addition to system performance measurements on availability, quality, and efficiency, point to larger supply chain system root causes. In response, UNICEF, VillageReach, and other partners are developing materials to introduce a “system design approach” to improving supply chain performance. System design is a series of discrete and potentially iterative steps producing a plan or blueprint for how the end-to-end supply chain should operate, identifying how all of the components of the supply chain (transport network, distribution policies, inventory policies, storage locations, human resources, planning, monitoring, equipment, supervision, data, etc.) fit together and interact in the most efficient way. 

The workshop will begin by defining what a system design approach is, with examples. The rest of the workshop will include explanations of strategies, practical demonstrations of interactive, hands-on activities, and a brainstorming session to elicit ideas on barriers to using this approach to improve performance of supply chains across the world. 

This is Part II: to follow previous Demand Estimation Workshop

Following the presentations from the presenters in the first session, we will spend an hour on discussing new innovative ways for demand estimation and determine whether real synergies exist for collaboration between different organizations. Fast-growing need for humanitarian assistance and the limitations on available resources to provide relief highlights the importance of strategic and efficient planning of operations in the humanitarian sector. In 2015, around US$ 25 billion was spent on life-saving assistance to 125 million people. While this amount is incomparable to the dedicated funds in prior years, United Nations discusses in its report to the Secretary-General the unprecedented inefficiency of fund utilization. 

Effectiveness of preplanning in humanitarian logistics and supply chain management rely on demand estimation. Good predictions of humanitarian relief and emergency response demand not only accelerates the time of providing assistance, but also increases the utilization of available funds. Humanitarian relief and emergency response demand is a function of multiple interdependent factors. Time, location, type of disaster, population, infrastructure, political issues, neighboring countries, financial circumstances, and countless other influencing factors might need to be taken into account in providing a reliable estimation of demand. 

On the other hand, scenario building takes into account various possible future realizations and introduces a range of estimations that embeds trends of uncertainties representing usual errors necessary for the process of decision making. While demand estimation is crucial for the efficiency of operations, detecting influencing factors and collecting relevant data is another challenging realm. Although several international organizations such as CARE, UN and INFORMS collect data on relevant subjects, they each use separate categorizations, indexing, or more importantly lack consistency and availability throughout the years, countries and categories. Merging available information, identifying significant factors, mapping data into usable format, and ensuring that factors considered are not redundant is a subset of the issues faced in the former stages of demand estimation in humanitarian sector. 

Today, available historic information help choosing the best statistical and computational predictive models for demand estimation and scenario planning. The goal of the workshop is to bring together various stake holders from academia, humanitarian agencies, and research organizations to discuss the state of the art in demand estimation and existing challenges.

As humanitarian and development projects struggle to reach all populations in need of food aid assistance, maximizing food aid supply chain cost effectiveness has become an ever more salient issue. Economic decision-making around food aid policy and programming requires sound evidence in food aid commodities’ cost and cost-effectiveness. This goes beyond price per ton of food provided to understanding the total cost of an effective intervention in relation to defined outcomes among food aid beneficiaries. Two important issues need to be addressed: i) how to fill significant evidence and data gaps; and ii) what tools and frameworks could be used to improve prescriptive modeling.

The workshop seeks to address these issues by offering an introduction to several food aid supply chain cost effectiveness frameworks currently used by development and humanitarian organization decision makers at different levels. It will also feature an interactive discussion with session participants on how to address current information gaps and overcome barriers to implementing these tools and frameworks. By the end of the session, attendees will have a better understanding of (1) which sources of information could generate more timely and complete information on costs along the entire value chain; (2) how decision-makers make choices relating to food aid supply chain management;  (3) what is needed to make supply chain cost effectiveness frameworks, tools, and models more predictive; and (4) the steps that humanitarian and development programmers and policy makers can take to implement and improve these frameworks and tools in their own work.

Over the last decade significant investments have been made to change the nexus of addressing capacity building for supply chain system strengthening. These capacity-building strategies have focused on harnessing regional talent, increasing private sector engagement, building academic partnerships with the aim to increase long-term pipeline of supply chain talent.

The panel members will discuss the preliminary success, challenges and lessons learned in building connections and collaborations across academia to achieve a large-scale transformation of supply chain systems both in the public and private sectors. Based on their experiences of building academic partnerships, the panelists will outline the challenges of building a talent pool and the feasibility and sustainability of these partnerships in the longer-term. This workshop will provide an opportunity to have an in-depth discussion on the social and economic factors required to build supply chain talent through academic partnerships.

Discussion about ongoing initiatives/projects and tools, and potential collaborations.

Over the past decade, PFSCM has supported global donors (USAID, the Global Fund) and Ministries of Health to solve a variety of supply chain challenges – the goal being to ensure that critical health products reach the patients who need them. Of all the facets that this challenge has presented, solving the last mile has been, and continues to be, the greatest one. Developing the capacity of local private-sector service providers has enabled improved supply chain performance, and deployment of much needed infrastructure at the last mile has contributed to improved access to health products. Topics to be explored include; (1) improving the performance of local private-sector actors to support public health requirements, (2) providing compliant pharmaceutical storage capacity at the last mile, increasing patient access, and (3) leveraging private-sector warehousing capacity to meet public health program storage needs.

Ongoing war and conflicts have displaced many people around the world, and over half of those refugees are children. Those who make it to host communities still face steep challenges, including social isolation, ongoing trauma from conflict and displacement, discrimination, and complete disruption of educational and professional opportunities. Meeting vast humanitarian needs in this complex environment requires innovative approaches. Within these conflict zones, psychosocial tools such as music, movement, and sports development have emerged as a key tool for creating safe spaces for refugee children and youth to recover from the traumas of war, build social cohesion, and create transformational changes within their own communities.

This workshop will discuss the dual use of sports development and offline mobile data collection tools in low-resource humanitarian settings, particularly in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis. It will highlight how sports development, specifically the unique Afro-Brazilian art form of capoeira, is being used to improve the mental and physical health of conflict impacted children. Our discussions will consider how the utilization of offline mobile data collection tools can help small-scale NGOs combat cost and infrastructure challenges to promote effective and dynamic monitoring and evaluation of projects. Finally, our audience will get a real, hands-on simulation on data collection in the field.