Understanding the Complexity of Emergency Supply Chains

PART 2

A Proposed Hierarchy for Evaluating Effective Supply Chains

Introduction

This section proposes a hierarchy for examining, evaluating, and improving a supply chain that is predominantly based on its ability to achieve effectiveness. While this hierarchy is mostly relevant to military emergency supply chains, it may also be useful to disaster relief supply chains, as both supply chains share the characteristic of their dependency on effectiveness versus efficiency, in contrast to the conventional commercial supply chain “objective function,” which values both effectiveness and efficiency equally.

Effectiveness can be defined as the ability to achieve a certain desired result. Although counterintuitive and somewhat ironic, the military supply ...