By Farrah Cole and Allan Janssen

Canadian supply chain experts and aid workers say the lessons of humanitarian logistics learned during tsunami relief efforts in Southeast Asia in 2005 have been put to good use this year in Haiti.

They’ve seen a dramatic improvement in the way non-government organizations and relief agencies have responded to the Haitian earthquake disaster of Jan. 12, 2010, compared to the way the world responded when an earthquake in Sumatra on Boxing Day 2004 triggered a series of tsunamis that devastated coastal areas in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.

And they point out that Haiti is just the latest proving ground where logistics lessons are being learned. Here are six things they told Logistics Magazine they’ll be adding to their humanitarian logistics handbooks.

1. Have a disaster relief plan ready before the disaster hits.

Mira Cuturilo, operations manager for Action Against Hunger (ACF) says despite the total destruction of her group’s offices in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, it was able to react quickly to the emergency because of how prepared it was in advance of the emergency.

“The thing logistically about an operation like this is the prevention and the preparedness,” she says. “Working in relief, we’re already set up for this.” She says within hours of the earthquake, ACF had an AirBus plane en route to Haiti to bring relief supplies in.

Marilou Poirier, logistics manager for the Canadian Red Cross, has the same viewpoint. She stresses that preparation for a disaster before it strikes can save both lives and valuable time.

“It’s all pre-established. When a disaster happens, there’s no time for contacting suppliers, dealing prices, making sure there’s product available, and all of that. You have to have a certain capacity to deploy material quickly,” she says. “Within five minutes, I can contact my people in (storage facilities across the world) and we’ll find a charter to fly to the affected area.”

Access to supplies at a moment’s notice is critical during a crisis like the Haitian earthquake which left thousands dead and an already weak supply chain infrastructure in shambles. Those with an emergency logistics system in place ahead of time were far more effective than those scrambling to get supplies.

Dr. Paul Larson, head of the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business, Supply Chain Management department, says that overwhelming the receiving system is common after a major disaster. He says the number of well-established relief agencies already on the ground in Haiti before the earthquake helped avoid that problem.

“(Agencies on the ground) already know what the needs are,” he says, and they’re able to assess their own priorities fairly quickly. For Bérengère Tripon, the ACF program coordinator who worked in Haiti following the earthquake, it’s almost impossible to avoid overwhelming the system when the need is so great and the desire to help is so strong.

“Even though the airport was made operational quite quickly after the earthquake, it was overcrowded with humanitarian assistance,” says Tripon.

The quick repair of the airport in order to receive the aid from overseas was miraculous considering the fragile nature of logistics infrastructure after a devastating natural disaster.

“The real constraint for agencies after a physical event is, quite simply, the destruction of infrastructure,” says Paul Caney, a supply chain expert working with Doctors Without Borders. “In the case of Haiti, the port was severely damaged, the road infrastructure was severely damaged, a lot of warehousing space was severely damaged.”

While things improved dramatically within weeks of the earthquake, with road and port repairs allowing aid to filter into the country more quickly, it was initially a challenge to operate within the diminished capabilities of the ruined infrastructure.

“It seems to me there has been a prioritization of goods coming in for long-established aid agencies that have programs on the ground in Haiti,” Caney says. “That has been more successful than the almost ‘shotgun’ approach of the tsunami where the whole world was sending whole containers full of well-intentioned goods that actually choked the arteries of the worst affected areas.”

He says relief groups seemed to be operating on the assumption that someone would see the value of the bulk supplies being sent to the disaster area and simply put them to good use. Without having a clear consignee, however, significant amounts of aid did not get used quickly.

This time around, relief agencies seemed to understand how critical it is to have someone meet the goods being sent.

Karen Ciberti, operations manager for the humanitarian aviation agency AirServ, agrees a real lesson was learned during the tsunami relief efforts, but she admits there were still issues in Haiti with having someone meeting the aircraft when supplies came in.

“A lot of people were shipping cargo in and thinking, ‘Someone there will use it.’ It didn’t have a consignee attached to it and (supplies) would just sit there,” she says.

Ciberti was on the ground in Haiti’s neighbour-state, the Dominican Republic, within days of the disaster. Stationed at the airport in Santa Domingo, she was responsible for running aid workers in and out of Haiti. She says the rescue efforts in Haiti were far less complex than in southeast Asia where the devastation was spread across a great geographical area.

 “Haiti is such a small country, you can’t compare it to the tsunami, where there were different countries and islands (receiving aid),” she says. “There were so many response targets and things that had to be coordinated. (In Haiti), the only place that you could get into was Port-au-Prince. There wasn’t a whole lot of logistical co-ordination that could be done.”

Dr, Larson it’s important for the aid agencies to co-ordinate their relief efforts during an emergency like Haiti, especially when all the agencies are facing the same constraints of the ruined infrastructure.

“Ideally, all the organizations would synchronize their efforts,” Dr. Larson says.

Cuturilo says that while the coordinated efforts on non-government agencies have improved since the tsunami disaster, there is still a long way to go.

“Logistically, the UN has set up a nutrition cluster (of agencies),” she says. “It’s called the logistics and emergency cluster. They are kind of the governing co-ordination group who offer operational support for co-ordination, for information management and communications.”

The ability to work together is what makes it easier for the group to decide who is best equipped to respond to different areas of the effort, such as addressing infrastructure concerns and dispensing supplies. Ciberti says this type of co-ordination makes it easier, especially when working with limited spaces like the airport where she was stationed.

NGOs and relief agencies in Haiti synced their efforts through the Office for the Co-ordination of Affairs, an organizing body under the direction of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other government agencies. Daily meetings were held with a representative from each organization to organize efforts.

Poirier says as a logistics manager she takes the time to constantly reassess the situation, even after supplies have been deployed. It is why half her time is spent replenishing the Canadian Red Cross warehouses. She also stresses the importance of sending supplies by more cost efficient means even while responding to the initial emergency.

“We have stocks in Panama, so (Red Cross) sent supplies by boat to Haiti at the same time we were deploying stocks to Santa Domingo by plane,” Poirier says. ACF also had the same type of experience when it came to their response.

“One of the most important lessons learned has been to be able to be very reactive while thinking about the future at the same time, to find solutions to the immediate issues while implementing the necessary process to anticipate for the middle and long term,” says Tripon.

Caney agrees that in an emergency, the goal is to get relief as quick as possible to the people in need, but the delivery method may change as the situation evolves. For example, the cost of utilizing planes to delivery supplies can become expensive once the initial need diminishes.

“When the emergency phase is over, you’re into a more stable kind of program,” he says. “The focus switches more to efficiency than effectiveness. In the initial phase, the response is all about effectiveness and we’re not so worried about how much it cost. That changes towards more efficiency and being much more careful about the long term sustainability.”

When a disaster strikes, the phone lines at relief agencies tend to light up and the e-mail inboxes fill up with volunteers of help. But the Red Cross, ACF, MSF and AirServ all say it’s best if the logisticians they’re going to need at these times have been lined up ahead of time.

“On this kind of emergency, it’s very important to have competent local staffs,” Tripon says. “This has been extremely important both to be quickly operational but also to have a proper understanding of the situation and to start needs assessments.”

“Start some type of dialogue outside the emergency,” Caney recommends. “That makes it easier for (an organization) to turn to that particular commercial supply chain specialist who has something to offer should that need arise.”

He says the differences between emergency organizations and long-term organizations are numerous; the demands of what a supply chain specialist does for each of them is different across the board. However, he adds, “we all need support.”