A study on the lead-times in the United Nations World Food Programme supply chain : a focus on the country offices

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the largest humanitarian agency in the world and the logistical arm of the United Nations, reached more than 113 million people in 80 countries in 2004 and delivered more than 50% of all the food aid in the world. In its endeavor of planning, designing, executing, monitoring and completing each and every one of the projects in which they are involved, all WFP business decisions and logistic steps are tracked down via an information technology tool called WINGS (WFP Information Network and Global System). This database is of extreme importance not only for the actions described above but also because it enables WFP Officers to learn from their past experience and improve their operations and efficiency in the future. This thesis aims to contribute to it. The first half of this study is addressed to briefly describing which business steps are in the WFP commodity pipeline and how the information flows from one another. It then moves into a deep statistical analysis in which lead-times from the moment the donor confirms its contribution to the moment food reaches the port of discharge are calculated.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• López, Marc

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Henry S. Marcus.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35685

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35685