Developing models for efficient planning to handle emergency situations.

Abstract

The motivation for the study was the sudden onset of Swine flu and the deaths that occurred in Mexico and United States beginning April 2009. This prompted us to study how supply chain issues could be applied to an emergency context to improve pandemic relief and mitigation measures. Secondary research revealed that a huge body of literature exists where possibilities of applying supply chain principles to emergency relief situations have been explored (refer Literature review section). Many researchers have built both empirical models by building frameworks to explain the emergency operations and theoretical models to explain the logistics operations from a quantitative perspective. However no detailed attempts have been made to explain supply chain issues in emergency operations by applying concepts of ‘cost’ from the quality literature and by applying concepts of ‘knowledge backup’ as a solution to tackling emergency operations. Hence, our study focuses on these two unexplored areas, namely analysis of the cost and proposing knowledge development as a key strategic solution to addressing emergency relief operations. Towards this end, we have developed both empirical and theoretical models. In the empirical study, we have built a multi-stage framework incorporating mitigation effects. We have also developed matrices to classify various diseases based on their probability of occurrence, impact and predictability. The theoretical excel-based model has been developed for two emergency situations which include Tsunami and Bird Flu. Due to extremely short duration of the event, Tsunami has been developed as a two stage model with pre and post disaster events. In contrast, Bird Flu, due to the dynamics involved in the spread of the disease has been developed as a three stage model with a stage before the disease occurrence, a stage during the disease and a post-event stage. Our models reveal that efforts during the pre-event stage can help reduce the overall loss by a significant amount. Also, there are certain events that appear to have a higher impact. Advance planning and its successful implementation are the most important deciding factors of the success of a relief program. We believe that the findings of our study can be applied to other emergency operations including swine flu. Thus we believe that the findings can be of overall public policy (health) relevance.