Humanitarian Fleet Management: Impacts on Logistics by Outsourcing

The main purpose of this book is to contribute with insights to outsourcing in the humanitarian sector, by focusing on fleet management activities. The theoretical framework showed little research combining outsourcing and fleet literature with humanitarian science. Therefore we aimed to answer the following research question: How can outsourcing of fleet management activities influence humanitarian logistics? To provide an answer to this question we looked at both the demand-side and the supplier-side by introducing three sub-questions. These sub-questions elaborated on the challenges involved in running fleets in the humanitarian sector, the current views on outsourcing from the humanitarian organizations' perspective, and the fleet management capabilities of a large logistics service provider that operates on a global scale. The logistics service provider selected was the Norway-based shipping company Wilhelm Wilhelmsen. Our main findings indicate that outsourcing is a strategy that has the potential of improving fleet management in the humanitarian sector, thus improving humanitarian logistics.