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Raising standards are leading humanitarians to become increasingly interested in measuring the performance of their supply chain. A few researchers have addressed this topic, building on classical measurement theories and trying to identify the salient features of the humanitarian sector. This young body of literature must now be tested against current practice. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The practitioners’ perspective is explored through a multiple case study, based on qualitative evidence, within three major humanitarian organizations. Results are discussed using a situation-actor-process – learning-action-performance model of inquiry. Preceding this investigation, a literature review delves into research on humanitarian supply chain performance measurement and presents the most relevant pieces in a general framework.

Humanitarians have elaborated measures whose essential focus is laid on service level. The more comprehensive approach advocated by researchers has received some consideration but is still poorly implemented. An issue that is given more priority by humanitarians is the accelerated supply chain integration they are going through.

In addition to an unprecedented literature review, this paper offers a comparative study of humanitarian organizations’ practices in the field of supply chain performance measurement. Humanitarian procurement centres, virtually ignored in literature until now, are scrutinized at a turning point of their evolution.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to investigate the role of big data and predictive analytics (BDPA) and social capital on the performance of humanitarian supply chains (HSCs); second, to explore the different performance measurement frameworks and develop a conceptual model for an HSC context that can be used by humanitarian organizations; and third, to provide insights for future research direction.

After a detailed review of relevant literature, grounded in resource-based view and social capital theory, the paper proposes a conceptual model that depicts the influence of BDPA and social capital on the performance of an HSC.

The study deliberates that BDPA as a capability improves the effectiveness of humanitarian missions to achieve its goals. It uncovers the fact that social capital binds people, organization or a country to form a network and has a critical role in the form of monetary or non-monetary support in disaster management. Further, it argues that social capital combined with BDPA capability can result in a better HSC performance.

The proposed model integrating BDPA and social capital for HSC performance is conceptual and it needs to be empirically validated.

Organizations and practitioners may use this framework by mobilizing social capital, BDPA to enhance their abilities to help victims of calamities.

Findings from study can help improve coordination among different stakeholders in HSC, effectiveness of humanitarian operations, which means lives saved and faster reconstruction process after disaster. Second, by implementing performance measurements framework recommended by study, donors and other stakeholders will get much desired transparency at each stage of HSCs.

The findings contribute to the missing link of social capital and BDPA to the existing performance of HSC literature, finally leading to a better HSC performance.

In recent years, the balanced scorecard (BSC) has received considerable interest among practitioners for managing their organization’s performance. Unfortunately existing BSC frameworks, particularly for humanitarian supply chains, lack causal relationships among performance indicators, actions, and outcomes. They are not able to provide a dynamic perspective of the organization with factors that drive the organization’s behavior toward its mission. Lack of conceptual references seems to hinder the development of a performance measurement system toward this direction. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors formulate the interdependencies among key performance indicators (KPIs) in terms of cause-and-effect relationships based on published case studies reported in international journals from 1996 to 2017.

This paper aims to identify the conceptual interdependencies among KPIs and represent them in the form of a conceptual model.

The study was solely based on relevant existing literature. Therefore further practical research is needed to validate the interdependencies of performance indicators in the strategy map.

The proposed conceptual model provides the structure of a dynamic balanced scorecard (DBSC) in the humanitarian supply chain and should serve as a starting reference for the development of a practical DBSC model. The conceptual framework proposed in this paper aims to facilitate further research in developing a DBSC for humanitarian organizations (HOs).

Existing BSC frameworks do not provide a dynamic perspective of the organization. The proposed conceptual framework is a useful reference for further work in developing a DBSC for HOs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of cloud computing (CC) use on collaboration and its ultimate impact on the agility of humanitarian supply chains. Further, this paper aims to analyze the moderating role of inter-organizational trust in the relationship between CC use and collaboration.

This paper provides an empirical assessment of CC use based on an interview analysis of 19 individuals from humanitarian organizations. A survey questionnaire is later used with 107 participants from US relief organizations. Partial least squares test is used to examine the relationships depicted in the conceptual model.

The results provide an account of how CC is used in a humanitarian context. Further, the results indicate that CC use has a positive and significant impact on collaboration between humanitarian organizations and their suppliers. Collaboration is found to be significantly positively associated with agility in humanitarian organizations.

No study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, has empirically assessed the impact of CC use on humanitarian supply chain collaboration. This will be the first study to empirically analyze the relationships between CC use, inter-organizational trust, collaboration and agility in a humanitarian context.

This study provides a theoretically and empirically validated model depicting the relationships between CC use, collaboration, agility and inter-organizational trust in humanitarian supply chains. Humanitarian organizations can use these findings to optimize agility.

This study contributes to supply chain management research, particularly humanitarian supply chain management knowledge, by empirically examining the usefulness of CC use on collaboration and agility in the supply chain.

This study aims to review the current research in the digitalization of the humanitarian supply chain performance management (HSCPM) and complement the insights found in the literature with the support of humanitarian organization (HO) reports. As a result, this study also identifies research gaps and directions for future research.

The study first used a systematic literature review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis to collect and review 25 peer-reviewed articles. Second, the study complemented the articles’ findings by collecting and analyzing 12 HO reports.

The study reveals the common understanding and links between HSCPM concepts and digitalization approaches, determining that the digitalization approaches per se used in the literature are indistinct and fragmented. Furthermore, it reveals the gaps between literature and practice that cause the research to develop slowly. Some suggestions are made to aid relevant future research. Both gaps and research directions are presented in Table 5.

This study first contributed to methodology in reviewing the digitalization of HSCPM research from literature and practical perspectives. There is a need to expand the data collection scope, integrate various analyses and foster collaborations with multi-disciplinary researchers and practitioners.

This study highlights the gaps and potential pathways for the research community to conduct future research investigations into the digitalization of HSCPM.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to analyze the HSC’s current research into the application of digitalization in HSCPM from both academic and practical perspectives. It also provides a replicable methodology for future studies.

We examine how design and implementation practices for supply chain performance management that have proven successful in commercial organisations apply to humanitarian organisations (HOs) to guide the process of designing and implementing performance management in humanitarian organisations.

We identify from the literature ten successful practices regarding the design and implementation of supply chain performance management in commercial businesses. We apply these, using action research over a four-year period, at Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) Belgium and draw conclusions from this.

We find that tools and techniques, such as workshops and technical sheets, are essential in designing and implementing supply chain performance measurement projects at HOs. Furthermore, making a link to an IT project is crucial when implementing performance measurement systems at HOs. Overall, our case study shows that performance management practices used in business can be applied and are relevant for humanitarian supply chains.

Previous research has argued that there are few empirical studies in the domain of performance management at humanitarian organisations. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to provide a longitudinal understanding of the design and implementation of supply chain performance measurement at HOs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare extant framework in humanitarian supply chain management (HSCM) and to propose a framework on humanitarian supply chain (HSC) performance measurement based on the content, context and process.

The structured keywords, namely humanitarian supply chain (HSC), humanitarian logistic (HL), humanitarian relief chain (HRC) and humanitarian chain (HC) as an exact phrase were searched in the title, abstract and keywords in the academic database. A total of 66 peer-reviewed articles were selected for analysis purpose that reports framework from the reviewed literature. These selected frameworks are categorized in dimensions, namely framework novelty, framework source, recognize elements/constructs of framework, comparative analysis of the framework and in-depth study of HSCM performance measurement.

The analysis reveals that the majority of these developed frameworks are novel and academic based. Case study is most prominent research methodology in the development of HSCM framework. Lack of coordination among humanitarian stakeholders is the major challenge in the empirical implementation of framework. This study proposes future research trend toward a unified HSCM framework that will facilitate to uncover the coherent set of elements/constructs in the field of HSCM.

This study considers peer-reviewed articles published in English language, and excludes conference papers, working articles, technical data/reports and book chapters.

This study categorizes new dimension for framework analysis and proposed an HSC performance measurement framework which gives new insights to the academicians, practitioners and policy makers for future work.

This examination gives the establishment to facilitate investigation of viable, efficient and effective HSCM, and detail opportunities for practices.

This study critically analyzes 66 frameworks under the different criteria to identify research gap and trends. Furthermore, this study proposes the HSC performance measurement framework.

Considered a strong method for exploratory investigations, case study research has become part of the mainstream approach, particularly in the field of humanitarian logistics (HL) and supply chain management. Nevertheless, similar to other logistics and SCM-related fields, rigor is not at its best. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for crafting case study research in HL, based on an analysis of published case study-based research.

The study classifies and compares the use of case studies in HL research, based on criteria developed from the methodology literature including purpose, type and volume of data, and type of analysis.

While case studies become more frequent, the results point out a lack of rigor, particularly regarding chain of evidence and the use of frameworks for case study rationale and analysis.

The study proposes a framework for case study design, based on four “check questions” that can help researchers to go through the process of crafting a case study.

The study provides practitioners with more understanding of case studies in HL research, which they can use when calling for or evaluating such studies in their organizations.

This paper offers an initial framework for conducting case studies in HL.

The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the use of standards and modularity for improving responsiveness in the humanitarian context.

Based on a conceptual framework and a systematic literature review, the authors conducted a longitudinal, explorative case on the Emergency Response Unit (ERU) concept in the International Federation of Red Cross Red Crescent Society (IFRC), focussing particularly on the Health ERU in the Norwegian Red Cross.

The authors found that the ERU concept makes use of many types of standards that complement and influence each other, and that the focus on modularity is increasing due to a growing need for responsiveness. Main challenges are trade-offs between autonomy and adaptability to the context resulting in more modularization which may be in danger of breaking the concept.

Results from this study could be refined by surveying staff involved in all types of ERU deployments. To explore the generalizability of the findings and test the propositions developed, more studies should be conducted.

The study provides more understanding of the use of standards and modularity for improving responsiveness. Practitioners can use the framework as a check-list to identify potential means for improvements. The case can be used for training, discussions, and reflections. The research feeds into IFRC’s and NORCROSS ongoing work to their global response tools.

The results of the study can support improvements in humanitarian supply chains, thereby providing affected people with cost-efficient, rapid, and better-adapted responses.

The authors develop a framework for categorization of standards and modularity in the humanitarian context. The authors provide the first empirical study on how humanitarian organizations use standards and modularity to improve responsiveness concluding with a set of propositions on how the concepts are linked.