scholarly journals A multi-criteria vertical coordination framework for a reliable aid distribution

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 789 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabiola Regis-Hernández ◽  
Jaime Mora-Vargas ◽  
Angel Ruíz

Purpose: This study proposes a methodology that translates multiple humanitarian supply chain stakeholders’ preferences from qualitative to quantitative values, enabling these preferences to be integrated into optimization models to ensure their balanced and simultaneous implementation during the decision-making process.Design/methodology/approach: An extensive literature review is used to justify the importance of developing a strategy that minimizes the impact of a lack of coordination on humanitarian logistics decisions. A methodology for a multi-criteria framework is presented that allows humanitarian stakeholders’ interests to be integrated into the humanitarian decision-making process.Findings: The findings suggest that integrating stakeholders’ interests into the humanitarian decision-making process will improve its reliability.Research limitations/implications: To further validate the weights of each stakeholder’s interests obtained from the literature review requires interviews with the corresponding organizations. However, the literature review supports the statements in this paper.Practical implications: The cost of a lack of coordination between stakeholders in humanitarian logistics has been increasing during the last decade. These coordination costs can be minimized if humanitarian logistics’ decision-makers measure and simultaneously consider multiple stakeholders’ preferences.Social implications: When stakeholders’ goals are aligned, the humanitarian logistics response becomes more efficient, increasing the quality of delivered aid and providing timely assistance to the affected population in order to minimize their suffering.Originality/value: This study provides a methodology that translates humanitarian supply chain stakeholders’ interests into quantitative values, enabling them to be integrated into mathematical models to ensure relief distribution based on the stakeholders’ preferences.

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Saurav Negi ◽  
Gaurav Negi

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify the issues and challenges in humanitarian logistics and to develop a framework for effectively managing the humanitarian logistics in disaster relief supply chain operations in India.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents a framework to manage humanitarian logistics effectively in disaster management through qualitative analysis. First, the author examines the challenges facing the humanitarian logistics and supply chain through the reviews of the literature on various disasters. Then, the author presented a framework based on the best practices and initiatives taken worldwide in the preparedness and response stage of the humanitarian supply chain to manage and reduce the aftermath of any disaster in context to India.FindingsA framework has been developed to manage humanitarian logistics in the disaster relief operation, which would improve the humanitarian supply chain in India and help to effectively manage natural disasters in the preparedness and response stage at the state and district levels.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper mainly emphasises on the preparedness and response stage of disaster supply chain management in Indian context.Practical implicationsNone of the disaster incidents can be stopped from taking place, but the impact can be minimised by proper preparedness and effective response during the operations of humanitarian logistics. With this hope, the framework has been developed, which if implemented would help to plan and manage any disaster incident in an effective manner, which ultimately would save millions of lives and cost in terms of infrastructure, property, assets etc.Originality/valueAs natural disaster incidents are occurring frequently in Indian states, there is an urgent need for a framework to manage the logistics operations effectively and efficiently during any disaster relief operations. Limited literature is found on developing and presenting a framework focusing on the preparedness and response phase of disaster supply chain management in context to India. Hence, this paper is believed to be the first to fulfil this gap with main emphasis on the preparedness and response stage of disaster supply chain management in Indian scenario.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Ihsan Ozdemir ◽  
Ismail Erol ◽  
Ilker Murat Ar ◽  
Iskender Peker ◽  
Ali Asgary ◽  
...  

PurposeThe objective of this study is to investigate the role of blockchain in reducing the impact of barriers to humanitarian supply chain management (HSCM) using a list of blockchain benefits.Design/methodology/approachA decision aid was used to explore the suitability of blockchain in humanitarian supply chains. To achieve that, first, a list of barriers to HSCM was identified. Then, the intuitionistic fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (IF–DEMATEL) method was utilized to determine the relationships and the level of interdependencies among the criteria. Finally, the intuitionistic fuzzyanalytic network process (IF–ANP) technique was employed, as it successfully handles dependencies among the criteria.FindingsThe findings of this study suggest that interorganizational barriers are the most suitable ones, the impacts of which blockchain may alleviate. This study further suggests that trust turned out to be the most significant benefit criterion for the analysis.Research limitations/implicationsThe readers should construe the findings of this study with caution since it was carried out using the data collected from the experts of a particular country. Moreover, the proposed decision aid contemplates a limited set of criteria to assess a possible role of blockchain in overcoming the barriers to HSCM.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study can assist humanitarian supply chain managers to make more judicious assessments on whether they implement the blockchain in humanitarian supply chain operations. Specifically, this research may help decision makers to identify the certain barriers, the impact of which may be reduced by using the blockchain. The findings of this research will also help various decision makers make more rational decisions and allocate their resources more effectively.Originality/valueTo the best of authors’ knowledge, no single study exists to investigate the role of blockchain in reducing the impact of barriers to HSCM using an intuitionistic fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making approach.


Author(s):  
Holger Schiele ◽  
Jasper Veldman ◽  
Lisa Hüttinger

In this chapter, the authors introduce the concept of preferred customer status as a means for creating supply-side induced advantages in highly competitive supplier markets. For the authors, being a preferred customer means that a buyer is awarded preferential treatment of important suppliers compared to what their other customers receive. Taking this into account, having Preferred Customer Status might also have a positive impact on the generation of innovation upstream the supply chain. As there is a lack of knowledge of what motivates suppliers to serve selected buyers better than others, the research presented here focuses on the suppliers’ evaluation of customers and how it can be influenced by buyers. Based on an extensive literature review, an overview is provided of recent contributions on customer attractiveness and supplier satisfaction as the prerequisites for becoming a preferred customer of strategic suppliers. Furthermore, the authors stress the importance of being a preferred customer particularly in a new product development context by empirically testing the impact of preferred customer status on supplier innovativeness in a buyer-seller relationship. They conclude that implementing a preferred customer policy in buying firms can improve the conditions for innovating with suppliers.


2012 ◽  
pp. 1120-1139
Author(s):  
Holger Schiele ◽  
Jasper Veldman ◽  
Lisa Hüttinger

In this chapter, the authors introduce the concept of preferred customer status as a means for creating supply-side induced advantages in highly competitive supplier markets. For the authors, being a preferred customer means that a buyer is awarded preferential treatment of important suppliers compared to what their other customers receive. Taking this into account, having Preferred Customer Status might also have a positive impact on the generation of innovation upstream the supply chain. As there is a lack of knowledge of what motivates suppliers to serve selected buyers better than others, the research presented here focuses on the suppliers’ evaluation of customers and how it can be influenced by buyers. Based on an extensive literature review, an overview is provided of recent contributions on customer attractiveness and supplier satisfaction as the prerequisites for becoming a preferred customer of strategic suppliers. Furthermore, the authors stress the importance of being a preferred customer particularly in a new product development context by empirically testing the impact of preferred customer status on supplier innovativeness in a buyer-seller relationship. They conclude that implementing a preferred customer policy in buying firms can improve the conditions for innovating with suppliers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 12743
Author(s):  
Muhammad Hamza Naseem ◽  
Jiaqi Yang ◽  
Ziquan Xiang

In the past few years, reverse logistics practices have successfully managed to gain more attention in various industries and among supply chain researchers and experts. This is due to globalization, environmental concerns, and customer requirements, which have asserted industries’ concerns for reverse logistics management. In E-commerce, the process of reverse logistics originates with parcel refusal, undelivered goods, and exchanges. In developing countries like Pakistan, the adoption and implications of reverse logistics are still at their early stages. E-commerce companies give more attention to forward logistics and ignore logistics’ upstream flow in the supply chain. This study aims to identify, as well as list, the barriers and obtain the solutions to those identified barriers, and rank the barriers and their solutions so that logisticians and experts can solve them as per their priority. From the extensive literature review and experts’ opinions, we have found 14 barriers in implementing effective reverse logistics. Eight solutions to those barriers were also found from the literature review. This paper proposed the methodology based on fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (fuzzy-AHP), which used to get the weights of each barrier by using pairwise comparison, and fuzzy technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (fuzzy-TOPSIS) method, which was adopted for the final ranking of solutions to reverse logistics. The case of the Pakistan E-commerce industry is used in the proposed method.


Author(s):  
Brahim Jabir ◽  
Noureddine Falih ◽  
Khalid Rahmani

<p>In the socio-economic world, the human resources are in the most top phase of the enterprise evolution. This evolution began when the arithmetic, statistics are applicable over a vast of opportunities and used to identify problems and support decision. However, analytics has been emerged to provide predictions and understand the people performance based on available data.</p>In light of this vast amount of information, human resources services need to deploy a predictive management model and operating system of analytics that can be an efficient and an instead solution that can respond to the gaps of the traditional existing ones and facilitate the decision making. In this paper, we present a literature review of this HR analytics concept and a case study concerning the impact of interventions using an analytics solution.<p> </p>


Author(s):  
Rozana A Huq

Abstract- There is a growing realisation that in the complexity of the post-modern world, it is becoming less and less feasible to concentrate leadership and decision-making solely at the top of the organisation.  Hence, one of the reasons for empowering employees is that employees are able to take decisions quickly, without looking for manager’s approval all the time, in a participative decision-making capacity. But, the lack of knowledge about employee empowerment and the absence of a framework for implementation has created problems.  Although there is high consensus in the management literature that employee empowerment is necessary for the survival and success of organisations, there are still considerable gaps in our knowledge and understanding of a range of issues concerning employee empowerment, both at the conceptual and practice levels [Conger and Kanungo, 1988; Morrell and Wilkinson, 2002; Huq, 2008; 2010; 2015].  This lack of knowledge is dangerous, as it has serious implications how ‘managers and non-managers conceptualize employee empowerment’ [Hill and Huq, 2004: 1025]. The aim of this research titled: An Investigation of What Employee Empowerment Means in Theory and in Practice [Huq, 2008] was to investigate the meaning of employee empowerment both at the conceptual and practice levels.  An interpretivist approach employing qualitative methods was adopted; it involved conducting two in-depth information-rich case studies, described in this paper as Large Organisation and Small Organisation respectively. The knowledge drawn from the management literature review proved unsatisfactory, hence this author felt the need to conduct a multi-disciplinary research review in order to draw knowledge from another discipline, namely social work [Huq 2008; 2015], where empowerment is an important construct.  However, it is important to note that due to limited space, this author is unable to go into details of both the literature reviews, management and social work, in this paper.It is sufficient for this paper to report that a number of ‘themes’ of employee empowerment exist, but they are fragmented in the management literature. These ‘themes’ are not found in any one place, which leads to confusion when organisations try to implement employee empowerment.  Furthermore, there is a gap with regards to the knowledge of employee empowerment in the management literature and it is important to look at another discipline to get a fuller understanding of ‘empowerment’. A multi-disciplinary literature review thus enabled this author to put together themes of empowerment from the management and social work literature that are relevant to employee empowerment.  These seven themes of employee empowerment are as follows: power-sharing, participative decision-making, devolution of responsibility, people-oriented leadership style, access to information, collaboration and enablement, described as a ‘kaleidoscope of themes’Huq’s Model C, [Huq, 2015], as illustrated in the ‘Introduction’ section of this paper. One of the conclusions of this research is that leaders and managers need to pay attention to the impact of participative decision-making with regards to empowering employees, which has significant implications for human resource management and if implemented properly can lead to a more judicious utilisation of human resources at all levels.


Author(s):  
George O. Tsobanoglou ◽  
Eirini Ioanna Vlachopoulou

The EU recognises that islands suffer from disadvantaging external natural and economic circumstances. As the need for public participation in decision-making increases, in order to address economic and social cohesion issues, both national and supranational authorities should take action to reinforce community involvement in policy. This research, using information from case studies from Greek islands, investigates the obstacles in promoting public participation in insular areas from a European perspective. The study was based on qualitative research methods and an extensive literature review. In areas with low cohesion, attempts for participation failed. In other areas, where social cohesion was maintained, there was mistrust towards local authorities but the members of the community were eager to collaborate with the researcher to promote participation. It was evident that there is urgency for adoption of national and European policies focused on the needs of the insular communities, with respect to their unique circumstances.


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