Relief when you need it: can FedEx, DHL and TNT bring the delivery of emergency aid into the 21st century?

Byline: Silvia Spring

When disaster relief absolutely, positively has to arrive on time, it often does not. According to a 2005 study by the Fritz Institute of San Francisco, California, which studies aid operations, humanitarian agencies are 20 years behind big corporations in adopting the basic tools of modern logistics. After the 2004 tsunami, for example, most relief workers looking for supplies had no access to the kind of tracking software that traces every standard overnight parcel worldwide. The result is that lives, not just packages, are needlessly lost.

This is starting to change, however, as humanitarian groups move to adopt the methods and mind-set of big business. The trend has accelerated rapidly since Bill Gates announced plans to move into humanitarian work full time come 2008. Nothing has energized the world of humanitarian causes more dramatically than the imminent arrival of Microsoft's founding taskmaster and his billions--as well as another $30 billion from his buddy Warren Buffett. When the world's richest man sets out to save the world, and demands results, interesting things start to happen.

Take the emerging industry of "humanitarian logistics." Those in the field understand that with the number and complexity of disasters on the rise (for reasons no one can quite pinpoint), the need to ship food, water, tents and first-aid supplies quickly and efficiently is becoming ever-more critical. The Fritz Institute has run annual humanitarian-logistics conferences since 2004. Georgetown University has a course on the subject and MIT offers a humanitarian concentration for logistical engineers. The largest humanitarian trade fair to date was held this May in Dubai.

Many of the leading private-sector logistics companies now have humanitarian programs or partners. In April, DHL of Germany launched its Disaster Response Team in Asia, the first of many that it plans to develop into a global network in cooperation with the United Nations. FedEx has partnered with the American Red Cross since 1996, and has created a miniature version of its own Memphis, Tennessee, control room at the relief group's Washington, D.C., headquarters. TNT, based in the Netherlands, has a humanitarian arm it calls Moving the World, which now works with the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in 60 countries. The program's communications director, Luke Disney, says his company's expertise is a perfect fit for the WFP, which has "thousands and thousands of vehicles with spare-parts and refueling needs." TNT has advanced systems that can tell the WFP not only where every single one of its trucks is, but ...