ABSTRACT
There has been a considerable amount of research into how commercial organisations respond to fluctuations or uncertainty in their supply chains (Lin et al., 2006). In the humanitarian context, research has been more limited;however, some authors have suggested that the application of lean or agile principles may help humanitarian inter-organisational networks to become more responsive to the disruptions and to imbalances in both supply and demand (Scholten et al., 2010;Oloruntoba and Gray, 2006). Charles et al. (2010), for instance, also argue ‘by constantly working in environments with high degrees of uncertainty, humanitarian organisations end up becoming specialists in the implementation of agile systems’. Similarly, as Tatham and Pettit (2010) explain ‘the application of commercial supply network management theory and practice has received limited consideration within humanitarian logistics literature to date’. Therefore, a deeper investigation into the potential improvements in efficiency and effectiveness that commercial business concepts offer to humanitarian logistics is needed.
