Determining the importance level of critical success factors affecting humanitarian supply chain: Analytic network process application

Many countries in our world suffer from disasters and emergency. Because frequency and intensity of disasters and emergency demonstrate an increasing trend in recent years. For this reason disaster relief or humanitarian supply chain management are one of the most important subject for a country. In order to reduce the adverse impact of disasters or emergencies and to improve the humanitarian practices, academicians, researchers and practitioners are focusing on various factors of humanitarian supply chain. Critical success factors have been widely used in the context of business supply chains. In this direction, the purpose of this thesis is identify critical success factors in the context of humanitarian supply chains. Through are a detailed literature review and expert group consultation, five main factor and 27 critical success factors which are sub-factors of main factors for humanitarian supply chains have been identified. Degrees of importance of the factors are determined with the help of 25 humanitarian experts. Analytical Network Process (ANP) is selected as the most appropriate method for the thesis, because the problem includes so many factors and dependancies between the factors. Therefore, ANP and Super Decisions software program has been used for evaluating the success factors which are critical for effective management of humanitarian supply chains. According to ANP, the most important main factor is management and most important critical success factor is training and education which is a sub-factor of human resource management. Keywords: Humanitarian logistics, disaster relief logistics, humanitarian supply chain, disaster relief supply chain, Analytic Network Process (ANP).