Certain humanitarian response teams (such as medical or search and rescue teams) are often the first international responders to provide aid in the affected area. For instance, after an earthquake search and rescue teams find and free people who have been trapped under rubble, which focuses on the first 72 hours after the on-set of a disaster. To enable their missions, the teams are dispatched with a variety of stored materials, e. g. medical supplies. These materials are mostly stored in the teams’ home country, in warehouses that lie dormant most of the time. Managing these warehouses is difficult, as management has to minimize resources while there is no disaster, but serve immediately when stored material is needed. Also, the warehouses are often operated by volunteers, who have been professionally trained but naturally cannot keep up with the set of skills and experience of full-time professional aid workers. Warehouse management would benefit from reference processes and warehouse management systems that guide managers and volunteers.

 

The objective of this thesis is to propose a set of reference processes for warehouse management that respect the specific requirements and, on this foundation, create a requirements profile for warehouse management systems to be used by humanitarian aid organizations. The requirements profile shall eventually be used to evaluate existing warehouse management software for the humanitarian sector, e.g. Sahana Eden.

 

The use case is provided by B-FAST, the renowned team providing global search and rescue services on behalf of the Belgian government. Depending on the situation at the time of working on this topic, it might be possible to record processes and do further research activities during a field trip to B-FAST in Belgium.