Tactical Decision Making in Public Health and Hummanitarian Response course starts
May 9, 2012! Click on the course title below for more information.
Humanitarian logistics encompasses a broad range of activities related to preparing, responding to, and recovering from natural and man-made disasters, as well as ongoing humanitarian crises due to war, famine, and infectious diseases. In humanitarian organizations, inefficiencies in preparation, response, or recovery can result in unintended consequences, including the loss of lives. These challenging logistics and supply chain management problems require specific knowledge and training for effective action in humanitarian operations.
The Georgia Tech Health and Humanitarian Logistics Center is offering a new professional certificate program focused on Health and Humanitarian Logistics.
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The executive learning program is designed for practitioners in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government, industry, and military who are active participants in humanitarian relief operations.
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Courses are taught by world-renowned, award winning industry experts. Learn more about the instructors below.
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New logistics concepts and strategies will help you improve decision making in preparedness, response, and system design.
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Courses will be offered in a blended format combining face-to-face and online interactive tools.
Click on a course title below to lean more, including dates, pricing, and registration information.
Relief requirements for public health and humanitarian events are in general both unknown in size and type, and are affected by dynamic and hard to measure factors such as geographic location, local economy, infrastructure, social and political conditions, etc. Preparing for response to an unknown event requires an understanding of forecasting, distribution network design, freight transportation modes, strategies for managing transportation, and trade-offs between service levels, equity and cost. This course will examine methods and models for making decisions under uncertain conditions and explore the significant value that is obtained through informed decision-making in advance of an unpredictable event.
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
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Apply forecasting techniques to approximate supply and demand during a humanitarian event
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Design a supply chain system including the location of distribution centers and distribution strategies
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Optimize your organizations freight transportation strategy on your distribution network over time
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Understand and prepare for disruptions in supply, demand and transportation infrastructure
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Develop approaches that can be used to evaluate response strategies with respect to different objective criterions
A Preview of Course Topics:
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Forecasting
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Distribution network design
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Managing freight transportation
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Managing uncertainty
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Balancing multiple objectives
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In the aftermath of a disaster, there are numerous tactical decisions that must be made to ensure a successful recovery. These decisions can relate to the movement of resources, the management of supplies and services for recovery efforts, or infrastructure recovery such as clearance and removal of debris. Unlike for-profit supply chains, public health and humanitarian supply chains rely heavily on the availability of donations in the form of money, goods, services, resources, etc. Building up relationships with local vendors, usually in a very short period of time, may be a challenging task as well. This course will focus on developing effective strategies for procurement and supply chain management in addition to other tactical decisions in humanitarian response.
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
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Evaluate resource allocation tradeoffs in response to a health or humanitarian crisis and develop policies for the allocation of scarce resources, including medical and relief supplies
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Optimize procurement decisions for example for perishable goods such as food or medical supplies
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Make decisions for ordering materials and supplies including the quantities and frequency of orders, accounting for tradeoffs in inventory and holding costs and risk under uncertainty
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Compare and contrast inventory techniques for a single event versus ongoing operations
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Mitigate or reduce inventory variability and costs and increase service levels by sharing inventory information
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Optimize routing and storage of supplies on the transportation network across time and mitigate bottlenecks
A Preview of Course Topics:
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Resource allocation
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Optimizing procurement
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Inventory management
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Optimizing transportation decisions
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While organizations in a humanitarian response have common goals, often the lack of cooperation and coordination between organizations drives much inefficiency in relief efforts. The lack of collaboration and coordination is partially a result of responders competing for limited resources to achieve their own goals and lack of technology for effective information sharing. As a result, a systems view of a humanitarian effort is needed to ensure appropriate use of resources to meet the goals at hand. In humanitarian applications evaluation depends on organization performance across a set of metrics that address the needs of donors, beneficiaries, suppliers and internal management both in the short- and long-terms. This course will focus on methods and tools, such as information technology and design of incentives, which can lead to better humanitarian response systems by improving coordination and collaboration among different entities and reliable measurement and evaluation of system performance.
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
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Improve coordination within organization and collaboration across organizations
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Identify strategies in the creation of contracts to encourage collaboration and cooperation among supply chain partners
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Explain the impact of information sharing within a supply chain and between different humanitarian organizations
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Define metrics that fit with objectives and goals
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Design a system for analyzing data for evaluation of goals
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Evaluate the impact of supply chain actions on long- vs short-term goals
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Optimize the health and humanitarian response system with multiple decision makers
A Preview of Course Topics:
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Coordination and collaboration
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Measurement and evaluation
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System optimization
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Ozlem Ergun, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Co-Director, The Center for Health and Humanitarian Logistics
Dr. Özlem Ergun is an associate professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. She holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Ergun's research focuses on the design and management of large-scale networks. Specifically, she studies logistics and communications networks that are dynamic, partially decentralized, and are used and operated by coordinating but selfish entities. Her main research contributions are the development of a set of new algorithmic and analytical tools and their applications to important real world problems. She is also a co-founder and co-director of the The Center for Health and Humanitarian Logistics at the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in optimization and logistics. Dr. Ergun was awarded the NSF Career Award in 2003.
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Pinar Keskinocak, Ph.D.
Professor
Co-Director, Center for Health and Humanitarian Logistics & Associate Director of Research, Health Systems Institute
Pinar Keskinocak is an associate professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Associate Director of Research for the Health Systems Institute, and the co-director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Logistics at Georgia Institute of Technology. She received B.S. and M.S. degrees in industrial engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, and a Ph.D. in operations research from Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Keskinocak’s research focuses on supply chain management, with an emphasis on resource allocation, revenue management, auctions/pricing, due date/lead-time decisions, production planning/scheduling, and logistics/transportation. She is also actively engaged in research and applications in healthcare and humanitarian logistics.
Dr. Keskinocak is an associate editor of Management Science and IIE Transactions, a senior editor of Production and Operations Management (POMS), and on the editorial board of Journal of Revenue & Pricing Management. She is one of the founding members of the INFORMS-JFIG (Junior Faculty at Informs) group and has served as the president of JFIG.
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Julie Swann, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Co-Director, The Center for Health and Humanitarian Logistics
Dr. Swann is currently focused on the modeling and analysis of problems and algorithms in logistics, transportation and supply chain management. She has particular interests in developing and analyzing tools to manage demand, such as pricing, revenue management, or lead-time quotation, to increase the flexibility in the system and is currently doing work in humanitarian supply chains. Other research interests include applications of economics and optimization to healthcare policy.
She was awarded an NSF CAREER grant in 2004, and recently, one of her papers was selected as a Finalist in the Shepherd award at the CDC. In 2002, she received the Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Council of Logistics Management and was a Finalist in the Dantzig Doctoral Dissertation Competition at INFORMS. In 2006 she was inducted into the Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni of Georgia Tech.
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