Critical Success Factors for Humanitarian Supply Chain Management: A Grey DEMATEL Approach

Abstract

Humanitarian Supply Chain Management (HSCM) is an emerging field and has gained prominence in recent past. The increasing demand for proper planning has made disaster relief operations (DRO) a complex phenomenon. Moreover, the success of humanitarian supply chain is dependent on various factors which hold different degrees of importance for every DRO. This study considers the case study of floods in India and explores the critical success factors (CSF) for implementation of effective HSCM. The study also models the factors and classifies them into cause and effect using grey decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method. The study then adopts a sensitivity analysis by considering four scenarios and awarding different weights to the experts to validate the robustness of the results. The final results are further validated with a set of experts. The study explored 10 causal enablers and 8 effect-based enablers. Both causal and effect enablers are further clustered using principal component analysis which extracts three factors each. The study proposes a conceptual model which could further be tested using empirical data.