Coordination, cooperation and collaboration in relief supply chain management

Christian Wankmüller,Gerald Reiner

doi:10.1007/s11573-019-00945-2

Abstract

In recent years, an increasing number of natural and man-made disasters has demonstrated that a working relief supply chain management (RSCM) is crucial in order to alleviate the suffering of the affected population. Coordination, cooperation and collaboration within RSCM is essential for overcoming these destructive incidents. This paper explores the research undertaken in recent years, focusing on coordination, cooperation and collaboration in the field of supply chain management (SCM) and RSCM in order to provide unique definitions of these concepts taking the disaster setting into consideration. A systematic literature review including 202 academic papers published from 1996 onwards in top journals dealing with commercial supply and relief supply chain coordination, cooperation and collaboration is applied. In order to answer the underlying research questions in a proper way, a descriptive analysis and qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the papers are conducted. Descriptive results indicate that RSCM coordination, cooperation and collaboration have increasingly shifted into the focus of scientific research since 2001/2004 (i.e., 9/11 and the Indian Ocean Tsunami). Based on the qualitative content analysis, clear definitions of the terms coordination, cooperation and collaboration in SCM and RSCM were elaborated. The research landscape, as a result of the quantitative content analysis, allowed the identification of three issues that need to be addressed in future research work.

Highlights

Disasters of recent years have demonstrated that a working relief supply chain management (RSCM) is essential in order to optimally satisfy beneficiaries’ needs and to ensure efficient long-term recovery after disasters strike
From the diversity of definitions provided by academia it is obvious that the terms coordination, cooperation and collaboration cause turbulences in linguistic and scientific usage
The systematic identification and analysis of existing literature in the field of supply and relief supply chain coordination, cooperation and collaboration provide an overview of current scientific activities in this research area

Summary

Introduction

Disasters of recent years have demonstrated that a working relief supply chain management (RSCM) is essential in order to optimally satisfy beneficiaries’ needs and to ensure efficient long-term recovery after disasters strike (van Wassenhove 2006; Kovács and Spens 2007). The common structure of representing RSCM follows a four stages model comprising mitigation, preparation, response and recovery stages (van Wassenhove 2006) Each one of these phases includes core operations, such as relief items procurement, transportation and warehousing, to efficiently meet beneficiaries’ needs in disaster regions. People in charge of transport coordination have to decide on the number of vehicles, route planning, capacity of the vehicles and scheduling Warehousing, as another field where coordination, cooperation and collaboration is required, deals with decisions regarding the number and location of distribution centers and relief camps during disasters. The coordination of stakeholders in warehouse location decisions is influenced by location settings, logistics factors, national stability, costs and cooperation skills among all relief chain members (Roh et al 2013)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion