April292010
International Disaster Relief Becomes More Efficient, Organized »
“The supplies in Panama are part of an approach called prepositioning, a relatively recent improvement to disaster logistics. The chaotic response to the 2004 Asian tsunami showed that the aid organizations’ centralized systems weren’t nearly efficient enough. ‘Goods were being flown from China to Europe and then back to Indonesia,’ says Birgitte Olsen, who became the IFRC’s chief of logistics the previous year. She enlisted researchers at a handful of European business schools to figure out a better way of doing things. ‘For the first time, we really gathered the statistics and information to analyze the costs of our supply chain,’ Olsen says.”
Tags: /international
