**2.1 High availability and huge waste**

Since the ultimate goal of managing disaster relief inventories is to guarantee the availability of emergency supplies, studies on inventory pre-positioning mostly focus on the problems of material type and quantity and the accessibility for rescue and relief operations. Yet, another critical issue of DRS management is to ensure the quality level of these supplies. These disaster supplies and the related inventory management issues are significantly different from those of commercial business products. First of all, the prepositioning of DRS is mostly initiated, organized, and managed by the government. In China, 25 national-level warehouses for disaster relief purposes have been established in different regions, more than 300 provincial/city-level and about 2500 county-level disaster relief warehouses cover the most population of major cities and towns. The state budget on the essential purchase of disaster relief supplies reaches 1.35 billion RMB in the year 2016. Enormous money has been spent to ensure an available supply source when a disaster occurs.

However, disasters are highly unpredictable so that estimating the potential future needs for rescue and relief activities is very difficult. We can never tell when

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depreciation.

*Disaster Relief Supply Management*

every year.

and then cause huge waste.

**2.2 Resale and refill strategy**

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94008*

an earthquake comes, what the affected population is, how much the infrastructure is destroyed, and how long the influence can last. To assume social responsibility, government agencies must keep high inventory level as rescue insurance against destructive catastrophes. On the other hand, a region is unlikely to be frequently struck by catastrophic event within a year. Even on the earthquake belt area, earthquakes occur at different places. It is then often observed that DRS are stored in idle for a long time. In practice, many warehouses are suffering great waste because of the expiry dates of some essential items, such as food, water, and medicine. Due to a lack of regular monitory and proper management, a considerable amount is stored out of date and discarded afterward. After the Sichuan Earthquake in 2008, many warehouses for the anti-disaster purpose have been set up in neighboring areas. In the following years, there have been successively reported that emergency supplies like expired food, water, and sanitation articles, have run to enormous waste. Furthermore, most local warehouses are not well operated, even without professional regular monitory. It results in a surprising number of financial losses

In addition, when emergency supplies are needed, what is worse is that the quality of some short-life items can be at risk if without any turnover of the inventories. When an earthquake strikes, people are usually stuck in extreme situations of necessity shortages. Food, water, medicine, tents, and communication equipment are in desperate need. Emergency supplies need to be replenished with fresh items regularly to guarantee their quality availability in case of providing stale goods to affected people. Nevertheless, unqualified delivery of unfresh or even expired relief goods has been witnessed in the response operations to almost, if not all, disasters and crises. Because these consumable materials have a relatively short lifetime but are stored in a large volume, once out of date, they must be destroyed or discarded

It is then clear that the DRS management should be considered from a business perspective, to work with upstream producers, suppliers and logistics service providers on product manufacturing, procurement planning, inventory policy implementing and logistics service operations. We need to define and examine the responsiveness of product value to changes in time to find out the turning point of the quality change. From the operations management point of view, a value deterioration function of an emergency supply item can be constructed to determine the optimal timing to remove old inventories for resale and replenish with new items, provided the trade-off among the logistics cost, the holding cost and the value

Removed packaged food and bottled drinks, especially those dried items stored for disaster relief, are in good condition and might be welcomed to a secondary market. Although the freshness degrades over time, the food still has acceptable quality, clothes and essential rescue tools are almost at the same quality levels as new. From a business perspective, reselling the old inventories with markdown prices to a legitimate secondary market not only guarantees accurate access to available emergency supplies but also benefits the economy and environment by reducing tremendous waste. Therefore, managing the DRS is far more than to maintain the right type, quantity, and time availability of them. To design a detailed plan for monitoring the supplies in the inventory, understanding the secondary market, selling them at the right time points, and refilling the inventory has great potential. The key point of the resale and refill strategy is to properly estimate the time point of turnovers. Long-time storage causes the quality level and commercial value

## *Disaster Relief Supply Management DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94008*

an earthquake comes, what the affected population is, how much the infrastructure is destroyed, and how long the influence can last. To assume social responsibility, government agencies must keep high inventory level as rescue insurance against destructive catastrophes. On the other hand, a region is unlikely to be frequently struck by catastrophic event within a year. Even on the earthquake belt area, earthquakes occur at different places. It is then often observed that DRS are stored in idle for a long time. In practice, many warehouses are suffering great waste because of the expiry dates of some essential items, such as food, water, and medicine. Due to a lack of regular monitory and proper management, a considerable amount is stored out of date and discarded afterward. After the Sichuan Earthquake in 2008, many warehouses for the anti-disaster purpose have been set up in neighboring areas. In the following years, there have been successively reported that emergency supplies like expired food, water, and sanitation articles, have run to enormous waste. Furthermore, most local warehouses are not well operated, even without professional regular monitory. It results in a surprising number of financial losses every year.

In addition, when emergency supplies are needed, what is worse is that the quality of some short-life items can be at risk if without any turnover of the inventories. When an earthquake strikes, people are usually stuck in extreme situations of necessity shortages. Food, water, medicine, tents, and communication equipment are in desperate need. Emergency supplies need to be replenished with fresh items regularly to guarantee their quality availability in case of providing stale goods to affected people. Nevertheless, unqualified delivery of unfresh or even expired relief goods has been witnessed in the response operations to almost, if not all, disasters and crises. Because these consumable materials have a relatively short lifetime but are stored in a large volume, once out of date, they must be destroyed or discarded and then cause huge waste.
