A Discussion on Efficiency of the Supply Chain of Relief Goods and the Role of Involved Sectors

In Japan, Nankai Megathrust Earthquake is predicted to occur in the near future. As a countermeasure, the Japanese government has prepared several plans including a plan for supplying relief goods to victims, which have been announced in 2015. In response to the central government plan, some prefectural governments have also announced their plans for receiving the relief goods supplied by the central government. From the perspective of the logistics operations, both plans for supplying and receiving the goods must be agreed. However, some issues in the current plan have been found, firstly the relief goods are unnecessarily passed two storage yards before arriving to shelters. Secondly, for an efficient operation, it is necessary to use logistics tools (such as forklifts) for the operations in the storage yards. However, it is possible that the resources are likely to become insufficient due to a sudden increase in demand during the event. Thirdly, there is still yet a clear established agreement among prefectures, municipalities and private logistic sectors in the operations. In addition, many other problems are expected in the real operations, such as various sizes of the packages of relief goods, which will result in unnecessary delay for repackaging to be suitable for handling by forklifts. Therefore, in this paper, we provide some discussions on those issues to ensure that the plan will be operable in practice.