Supply Chain Management and Humanitarian Aid

The Landelijk Netwerk Mathematische Besliskunde (LNMB) and the Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB) jointly organize the one-day seminar "Supply Chain Management in Business and Humanitarian Aid", in Conference Center “De Werelt” in Lunteren, on January 19, 2012.  The seminar is the 14th in a series of annual seminars, following the previous successful seminars on “Operations Research & Enterprise Resource Planning” (1999), “Operations Research in Financial Management” (2000), “E-commerce & Operations Research” (2001), “Capacity management – How operations research models support decision makers” (2002), “New developments in Operations Research software” (2003), "On-line methods: Challenges for OR in a real-time world" (2004), "Mathematical Models for Financial Optimization" (2005), "Operations Research and Health Care" (2006), "Operations Research and Public Transportation" (2007), "Operations Research and Energy" (2008), "Operations Research and Traffic" (2009), "Operations Research and Health Care" (2010) and "Operations Research in Supply Chain Management and Marketing" (2011).

ABOUT THE THEME

This year is organized around two themes namely Supply Chain Management and Humanitarian Aid. Each topic delivers one or two key-note speaker, and some talks in parallel sessions with speakers from various backgrounds. What remains is the relation between OR and practice.

Newspapers today are again filled with news on hunger in the Horn of Africa. Over 925 million people are hungry around the world, 98% of them live in developing countries. Hunger is not the only challenge they face, sustainable access to basic healthcare is another. Operations Research can help to better organise food distribution to the hungry, construct the best emergency response possible and secure access to basic healthcare. We have invited prof. Kenneth Sörensen of to Antwerp University to talk about the added value of OR in Humanitarian Aid. Also we will hear how The NorthStar Alliance (http://www.northstar-alliance.org/) uses OR to design the basic care network in Africa. And it will be shown how OR can be used to optimise the bio-energy supply chain in a humanitarian context.

The Supply Chain theme of the conference will touch upon various subjects. Many times supply chain optimisation has the flow of goods as subject, prof. Tim Grant however will focus on modelling the information flow in humanitarian and military supply chains. The lack of perfect information in practice leads to challenges which prof. Tim Grant will illustrate using the logistics operation of the Task Force Uruzgan. Another big challenge in effectively managing supply chains is linking the strategic and tactical plans. When these are not linked good enough Sales & Operations planning is the missing link, Noud Gademann will introduce this concept and its practical implications. In S&OP quality forecasts on demand are required, a subject that will be covered by Freek Aertsen from EyeOn.