Research Proposal Presentation: Feyza Sahinyazan
Ms. Feyza Sahinyazan, a doctoral student at McGill University in the area of CREATE will be presenting her research proposal entitled:
FOOD AID LOGISTICS IN RESOURCE CONSTRAINED ENVIRONMENTS
Date: Friday, September 8, 2017
Time: 2:00 pm
Location: Room 310 (Samuel Bronfman Building – 1001 Sherbrooke Street West)
All are cordially invited to attend the presentation
Student Committee Chair: Professor Vedat Verter
Abstract
This thesis focuses on the logistical challenges and provide effective and, more importantly, implementable solutions by focusing on the operational structure of world’s leading organization fighting hunger: United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP).
In our first paper, we aim to understand the major challenges that WFP faces in the transportation domain and summarize the findings from the field trip to the WFP’s Kenya Office. Our field trip revealed that the office is facing considerable challenges with the third-party transporters contracted for aid delivery. Involving with multiple transporters in an undeveloped market causes volatility in the price, availability and reliability of the transportation activities in the country. Based on the interviews with the different stakeholders of Kenyan transportation market and our analysis revealed that there are four major factors that affect the transportation capacity availability and we developed a methodology that estimates the calendar of fluctuations of the Kenyan transportation activities based on those factors. This calendar enables WFP to determine the high periods of transportation activities and position their bidding, inventory and transportation operations accordingly.
In the second paper, we take the transportation price and supply issue one step further and design contracting scheme of WFP. The shipments are frequently delayed since the transporters tend to allocate their trucks to other jobs when the long-term contract rates are significantly lower than that of the spot market. Using data gathered from the Kenyan transporters, we demonstrate that the variation in transport spot market prices can be attributed to the volatility in fuel prices. In addition, we devise a new barrier-type options contract that can increase the transporters’ service levels. Our findings through numerical experiments on real-life data demonstrate that significant risk reductions can be achieved on corridors that are not desirable for the transporters, without a sizeable additional cost to WFP.
Our proposal is to explore a more radical solution to the excessive logistics costs and related operational challenges: providing cash and/or vouchers instead of physical food distribution, as a final piece of the thesis.
