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Top1. Introduction
In today’s business world competition is very high. Due to the globalization, advancement of technology, and increase in demand and supply organisations need to raise their bar of performance continuously. Increase in customer demand leads to the increase in supply chain. And supply chain management is a better way to compete in market as it is constantly evolving. It is the management of activities from availability and procurement of raw material, their processing into finished goods and then distribution of these goods. Today disasters seem to be striking all corners of world. So the importance of disaster risk management is indisputable. In any emergency the supply chain management deals with procuring food, medicines, clothes, and other resources from various government and non-government agencies. When a disaster occurs, it interrupts essential service such as health care, electricity, water, sewage removal, transportation and communications. Thus, it becomes very necessary to research about all the factors affecting the supply chain, its drivers and barriers and critical success factors.
This forms the basis of our study. Reduction of risk, readiness, response, and recovery are the main four steps during any disaster management:
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Risk reduction is a kinetic process in which risks are monitored, modified and analyzed. The most probable hazards and the severity of its effects if the hazard ever comes into play is first identified. After that, any immediate risks related to people are analyzed with a predetermined set of criteria. The necessary safety measures are taken to eliminate and control the severity of those risks.
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Readiness covers all measures and emergency planning. It must include primary human needs of communication, resources, control measures, media plan of action and processing of casualties.
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The main part of response is provided by the emergency services, followed by other voluntary and utility organizations. The prime concern is to save lives and relieve suffering.
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Recovery is the last stage of disaster risk management. It includes activities for returning to normalcy. It includes restoration of emergency services, relocation, financial amends, insurance and aftercare. It mainly starts from the stage of readiness and carried out from the response stage.
Each stage faces various individual challenges regarding gathering of information, interpretation, and dissemination for quick relief operations. It is impossible to eliminate the disaster risks. However, each disaster can be analyzed and managed for its future prevention. The research attempts to provide a systematic and technology driven risk lessening method in disaster risk management.
A hazard is mainly defined as a damaging occurrence which may cause heavy loss of life and property. These include natural hazards like biological or geological and also man-made hazards like technological hazards. Vulnerability is defined as an array of conditions resulting from various factors like, social, economic, political etc. which increases the ability to be maintained against hazards. It can also be referred to as a degree of loss due to hazards.
So, disaster risk can be formulated as:
In case of a disaster, it is very important to make sure that the supply is prompt and effective, ensuring the suitable goods and services reach the victims of the disaster taking logistical statistics into consideration. But, to ensure proper optimization of all resources involved it is required that all the contributing agencies are managed in an integrated approach to efficiently and effectively coordinate the performance of the respective organizations, get rid of superfluity, and increase efficiency along the entire disaster supply chain. There are mainly five critical differences that differentiates between emergency supply chain management from commercial supply chain:
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The demand is unpredictable;
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Demand is shorter leading to short lead times;
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The need for timely delivery to lessen human suffering;
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Damage to the logistics infrastructure caused by the disaster; and
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A lack of resources such as technology, transportation, warehouses to implement such a system.