What is SUSTAIN?

As of the beginning of March I am assigned to the SUSTAIN GP Partnership. Normally, specialist assignments are carried out in Africa or other far-away places of this world, this assignment is a bit different. Until now my main tasks have been in the United States and from the head office in Hoofddorp.

The SUSTAIN GP project is a Partnership with a number of NGO’s (Non- Governmental Organisations), Logistics providers and Consultancy firms. This partnership is dedicated to providing a supply chain platform for efficient delivery of humanitarian aid and development support.

SUSTAIN GP stands for ‘SUpply Strategies, Aid, Innovation, Network, Global Partnership’

• The 5 objectives of SUSTAIN GP are:
• Better, faster, and more competitive sourcing and logistics.
• Standardized supply chain practices, systems, and technology.
• Improved utilization of appropriate gifts-in-kind resources.
• Adoption of new technologies to improve supply chain management operations.
• Investments that enable equitable participation in the marketplace.

The Partnership has recently officially started when all parties involved signed the MOU (Memorandum Of Understanding).

The first phase is to better understand the existing deficiencies in the aid/development sector.

We focus on three area’s:

• Supply Chain – Identify and validate process areas for improved performance, define scale of change management, identify programmatic countries and supplier/source countries of focus.

• Spend – Identify and validate high priority procurement categories and cost reduction opportunities.

• Technology – Identify improvement opportunities at participating NGOs by base-lining existing systems, tools, and processes.

Over the last few weeks we have started with the assessments of the NGO’s.  With representatives of all the parties involved (World Vision, CARE, Good360, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture Development Partners, TNT and UPS) we conduct interviews and site visits to try to understand the existing situation in the above area’s.

What I have learned sofar, is that the aid/development sector is a huge “market”. Donations and GIK (Gifts in Kind) amount to big numbers. This poses challenges on the organizations that strive to get all the money and goods at the right time at the right place, all over the world, to those people that need it. All the money is spend, as much as possible, directly in favor of the beneficiaries, which means that no huge amounts of money are reserved for “internal” process improvements, like IT systems.

Sofar my first blog. I hope you all have a good impression of this important partnership. In a following blog I will explain more about the outcomes of the assessments. If you have questions or want to know more about this assignment or the project itself, please feel free to ask me anything you want.