what management science can bring to it. Now, in the studio today is Professor Martin Christopher.

Now, Martin, you are an expert on logistics and supply chain management, if we get something

like the Tsunami in South East Asia in 2004, what can logistics bring to that?

>>Martin Christopher: Well, I think one of the things that we have learnt from previous

disasters is that actually logistics is critical, not just in terms of the money – they reckon

something like every 70 to 80 pence in every pound that is raised actually goes on logistics

in one form or another. But I think more to the point, it is about rapid response and

one of the things that logistics and supply chains have focused on for a long time is

agility; how do you develop processes that are capable of responding more rapidly? And

that, I think, to me is at the heart of what modern humanitarian logistics really has to

be about.

>>Steve Macaulay: But, of course, we are not really a Tesco’s are we? We are dealing

with a very different situation here. What are the sort of things that you think are

different and need to be addressed?

>>Martin Christopher: I think you are absolutely right; obviously a regular sort of supply

chain has almost predictable demand, you can plan ahead and so on. But actually, if you

see what is happening in most economies these days, as we know, there are much higher levels

of turbulence, volatility and what we are all discovering actually is that we are having

to become a lot better at responding to events as they happen. And

so this word agility that I use, this is really what it is about; you are saying what have

you got to do differently in order to be able to move

more quickly and be better able to meet the needs of whatever the situation is – be

it a disaster, be it a market change or whatever. There are a lot of similarities.

>>Steve Macaulay: One of the things that happened in 2004 was a bit of a wake call really, that

is to say this isn’t working that well. I know that when I have been watching the

television at that stage I was thinking why aren’t they getting on with this? Why aren’t

they reaching the people? Why aren’t things moving more efficiently?

Things have changed there, haven’t they, I think?

>>Martin Christopher: Yes; because I think the Asian Tsunami highlighted as an amazing

case that we weren’t getting the level of coordination that we needed amongst all the

major agencies. There are a lot of lessons here about supply chain coordination; supply

chain management is actually about how do you manage all the linkages in this

very complex network?

And there are no easy answers or solutions to this, but the good news that came out of

that terrible disaster was this realisation that we had

to do things in a different way. And a major initiative – UN driven – to create this

idea of a logistics network, they call it a Logistics Cluster

where we try to get a higher level of coordination across these different agencies.

>>Steve Macaulay: So it seems to be very heartening that we can learn from commerce and things

from supply chain management and put them into these

very real problems?

>>Martin Christopher: Yes, I think so. I think in the past there has been a reluctance, to

say well humanitarian logistics is different, so we don’t really want to draw from defence

logistics, from commercial logistics. But what I am seeing actually now is a much greater

willingness of all these parties to come together, share ideas and

improve practice.

>>Steve Macaulay: That is good news; thank you very much.