Title: Analysis and assessment of humanitarian supply chain barriers for disaster and crisis management using hybrid approach

Authors: Vikram Sharma; Naveen Virmani; Pawan Kumar Arora

Addresses: Mechanical-Mechatronics Engineering Department, The LNM Institute of Information Technology (LNMIIT), Jaipur, Rajasthan, India ' Institute of Management Studies (IMS), Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, 201009, India ' Mechanical Engineering Department, Galgotias College of Engineering and Technology, G.B. Nagar, India

Abstract: There has been incessant rise in natural calamities across globe. Along with preventive and corrective measures, societies have to be ready to face natural or man-made disasters. Effective humanitarian supply chains can assuage the impact to natural and man-made calamities to a certain extent. This paper brings out common barriers to effective working of humanitarian supply chains. Ten barriers were identified and were validated on discussion with the practitioners from governmental and non-governmental organisations. Tackling all barriers simultaneously can be arduous task. Hence, this research makes use of DEMATEL methodology to bifurcate the barriers into two meaningful clusters - cause barriers and effect barriers. Further, interpretive structural modelling (ISM) technique has been used to propose a hierarchical model to deal with the barriers to humanitarian supply chain management (HSCM). Uncertainty of disaster is found to be topmost cause barrier. Inefficient logistics is found to be topmost effect barrier. The outcomes provide useful insight to planners, governmental and non-governmental organisations working in the domain of humanitarian logistics.

Keywords: humanitarian supply chain; barriers; DEMATEL; interpretive structural modelling; ISM.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPMB.2024.136466

International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking, 2024 Vol.16 No.3, pp.296 - 317

Received: 29 Jun 2022
Accepted: 17 Jul 2022
Published online: 02 Feb 2024 *

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