Recently many disasters occurred; they can be natural; Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Earthquakes, Flood, and in some instances two of these disasters can be combined together, e.g. Hurricanes causes flooding. These disasters develop emergencies within the Supply Chain.
Food Supply Chain is crucial to the beneficiaries in humanitarian disasters; it is obvious how disasters can interrupt the food supply to affected population. Disasters might be unpredicted, however their effect on supply chains cannot be totally unexpected (Coombs 1999). Supply chain is considered the whole process responsible for providing products to consumers. One of the main commodities handled by Supply chain is Food.
The idea is to develop a framework of Humanitarian Relief Supply Chains, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of such supply chains, ensuring that food products are properly managed and delivered on time to the affected population within the first 72 hours in a sudden humanitarian disaster.
The Humanitarian Relief Supply Chain framework depends on collecting data regarding the supply chains settings in pervious disasters, building a disasters database (or using current databases, if avialable),with respect to supply chain configuration and sturcture and the food supply settings and conditions. Analysing the given data will lead to developing a best practice framework, that will be used to better manage food supply in disasters.
This framework can be developed as a generic framework to be used in any occuring disaster. It can also benefit from other ideas presented to the competition, especially those related to the use of IT in managing disasters locations, IT is crucial in the communication between base and affected location, it is also important in managing the supply management processes and building user interface.