Toward a conceptualization of humanitarian service providers

• Date: 11 November 2019
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-04-2018-0091
• Published date: 11 November 2019
• Pages: 929-957
• Author: Diego Vega,Christine Roussat
• Subject Matter: Management science & operations,Logistics

Toward a conceptualization of

humanitarian service providers

Diego Vega

HUMLOG Institute, Hanken Svenska Handelshogskolan, Helsinki, Finland, and

Christine Roussat

CRET-LOG, Aix en Provence, France and Université Clermont-Auvergne,

Clermont Ferrand, France

Abstract

Purpose –Service development and outsourcing are growing trends in humanitarian logistics (HL).

Humanitarian organizations (HOs) have developed specialized units to perform logistics activities on behalf of

other aid organizations, as a commercial logistics service provider (LSP) would do. The purpose of this paper

is to explore the characteristics of HOs acting as LSPs and the differences with their commercial counterparts.

Design/methodology/approach –This research uses a two-level content analysis of 149 annual reports

from 50 local and international HOs, performed with the help of qualitative data analysis software. First, a

manifest content analysis identified the number of occurrences of logistics-related words and later, a latent

content analysis studies the use in context of such words to characterize the nature of HOs as LSPs.

Findings –Evidence shows that some international HOs –in some cases through specialized logistics

units –perform the same activities as commercial LSPs, providing similar services. However, due to the

characteristics of the humanitarian context, HOs acting as LSPs can offer a wider range of value-added and

dedicated services to clients (other HOs) than commercial LSPs.

Research limitations/implications –Exploring the activities performed by HOs on behalf of other aid

organizations and characterizing them as service providers constitutes a first attempt to grasp the unique

features of these particular humanitarian LSPs. The results open the discussion about the services HOs offer,

thus contributing to theory development in HL.

Practical implications –The identification of HOs acting as LSPs introduces a new actor to the

humanitarian network, which the authors refer to as humanitarian service provider (HSP). This supposes two

main managerial implications. First, the results support the idea of seeing servitization as a competitive

difference, having a substantial impact on the way HOs build their strategies and achieve competitive

advantage. Second, HSPs can push their commercial equivalents to identify new activitiesor services to offer

and maintain their competitive advantage with regard to the newcomers.

Originality/value –This paper furthers the discussion on the concept of HSPs and demonstrates its

uniqueness, thus contributing to the ever-growing body of knowledge of HL research.

Keywords Europe, Documentary, Logistics services, Logistics industry

Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction

The field of humanitarian aid is constantly evolving and so are the actors involved and the

roles they play. Logistics in this context is defined as “the process of planning, implementing

and controlling the efficient, cost effective flow and storage of goods and materials as well as

related information from the point of origin to the point of consumption for the purpose of

alleviating the suffering of vulnerable people”(Thomas and Mizushima, 2005, p. 60). Jahre

et al. (2015) note that of the $22bn spent on humanitarian operations in 2013, logistics

accounts for 60–80 percent. These activities are mostly performed by humanitarian

organizations (HOs)[1], which have developed “a professional approach in logistics”(Kovacs

and Spens, 2011a, p. 34) using information technologies to track and trace their goods

(Sandwell, 2011) and “setting up quite complex supply chains to assemble and distribute the

required food, shelter and other necessities”(Scholten and Scott, 2010, p. 625). Constrained The International Journal of

Logistics Management

Vol. 30 No. 4, 2019

pp. 929-957

© Emerald PublishingLimited

0957-4093

DOI 10.1108/IJLM-04-2018-0091

Received 11 April 2018

Revised 22 October 2018

21 May 2019

27 July 2019

Accepted 28 July 2019

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-4093.htm

The authors sincerely thank Professor David B. Grant for his comments and suggestions, Professor Britta

Gammelgaard for her continuous support, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

929

Humanitarian

service

providers

by many complexities (Overstreet et al., 2011), HOs must operate within an embedded

network of actors and perform various logistics activities just as firms do in the private

sector. Indeed, despite the contextual differences existing between humanitarian and

business logistics (van Wassenhove, 2006), “both processes account for the flows of goods

between the nodes of a network”(Gösling and Geldermann, 2014, p. 23).

Logistics outsourcing, a main feature of commercial logistics, has recently emerged in the

field of humanitarian logistics (HL). While private players are involved in humanitarian supply

chains carrying out “transportation, shipping, freight forwarding”(Oloruntoba and Gray, 2009,

p. 490), HOs also act as logistics service providers (LSP) (Abidi et al.,2015),executinglogistics

operations for their peers within the humanitarian supply chain. Heaslip (2013) presents various

examples of these practices such as IFRC providing procurement and transportation, or WFP

acting as consignee for other HOs, and later states that “most of the services humanitarian

organizations offer to each other fall under the realm of logistics”(2014, p. 116). HOs could

therefore be considered as LSPs, actors who “manage, control and deliver logistics activities”

(Hertz and Alfredsson, 2003, p. 140), given their capacity to perform logistics activities on behalf

of other humanitarian actors. However, theroleandimpactofHOsactingasLSPshave

received little attention by the scientific community (Dufour et al.,2018),andveryfewhave

actually investigated the activities performed/provided by HOs acting as LSPs in view of those

performed/provided by commercial LSPs. The purpose of this paper is thus twofold:

(1) explore the logistics activities performed and services provided by HOs; and

(2) characterize HOs acting as LSPs from commercial LSPs.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 examines logistics service provision in relief

chains. It successively broaches the logistics outsourcing in general and in these chains, the

relevance of outsourcing to peers for such chains and finally comes to HOs acting as LSPs, a

topic that needs further investigation. Section 3 details the research design. Section 4

presents the results of the qualitative content analysis, which are then discussed in Section

5. The conclusion addresses limitations and future research.

2. Logistics outsourcing in the humanitarian supply chain

For more than a decade, LSPs –third-party firms in the supply chain –have been a strongly

developed trend in the supply chain management (SCM) academic literature (Selviaridis and

Spring, 2007), mainly in response to the exponential growth that these companies

experienced in the early 1980s due to a generalized outsourcing movement (Quinn, 1999; van

Laarhoven et al., 2000). Nowadays, the trend still continues, as does the generally positive

growth rates for logistics services (Langley and Infosys, 2019). LSPs fulfill the function of

logistics intermediary thus “ideally placed to organize the pooling of logistical resources and

help supply chain achieve substantial economies in scale and scope”(Fulconis and Paché,

2019, p. 10). These arrangements notably negate capital investment in logistical assets and

reduce payroll (Grant, 2019). The process of logistics outsourcing involves external

companies to deliver, within the agreed budget and time-frame (Akbari, 2018), different

logistics services. Historically performing transport and warehousing operations for

industrial and commercial firms, LSPs have gradually developed value-added and

informational activities and nowadays offer a rich (Anderson et al., 2011) and “broad array

of bundled services that also includes warehousing, inventory management, packaging,

cross-docking and technology management”(Zacharia et al., 2011, p. 43). They have

“developed their capabilities both in terms of broader service offerings and in terms of

providing solutions adapted to specific customers or customer segments”(Fabbe-Costes

et al., 2008a) and “are likely to strengthen their value creation in supply chain networks both

at global and local levels”(Heaslip, 2013, p. 42). The main publications in the LSP literature

thus deal with logistics outsourcing from commercial and industrial firms, including main

930

IJLM

30,4