Daan van Beek "Orchestrating collaborative procurement in humanitarian operations"

People who are affected by a disaster need a coherent (i.e., equitable) humanitarian response with a wide variety of items, ranging from food to medicine. Humanitarian Organizations (HO) aim to procure these items as cost-efficiently as possible. Collaboration between HOs on procurement is likely to improve the cost-efficiency of procurement. However, it is unclear how this can impact the coherence of a response. Leveraging qualitative and quantitative data, we studied a real case of joint procurement in humanitarian operations. Combining these insights with an agent-based simulation, we study the impact of current and alternative collaborative strategies on the trade-off between cost-efficiency and the coherence of a response (equity). The results show that current strategies save costs but are likely to negatively impact the response coherence. The focus on harmonizing goals perpetuates the dominance of high-volume items. Alternative strategies on the other hand can soften the trade-off by leaving more room for the goals of individual HOs. Thereby, HOs are more likely to collaborate on lower-volume which positively impacts the coherence of the response.

Daan van Beek started his PhD at Kühne Logistics University in April 2022. His research focuses on inter-organizational collaboration in the humanitarian aid sector. He has a specific interest in modeling human behavior in collaborative processes.