Estudio de caso, Banco de alimentos de Bogotá en momentos de pandemia: retos y soluciones

Abstract

Generally speaking, food banks are community organizations that solicit food and financial donations from the public and corporate sectors and distribute food assistance locally, according to principles they have established. The Bogotá Food Bank's mission is to mitigate hunger and help all people in vulnerable situations in an emergency, so this document arises from the possibility of being able to guarantee that what was known during the moments of the Covid-19 pandemic at Banco de Alimentos de Bogotá, as a humanitarian organization, can be used to improve the effectiveness of future efforts. Thus, in this monograph we seek to design a logistics operations planning framework that allows us to respond to the challenges that arise in activities in times of pandemic at the Food Bank of Bogotá, through three main chapters of information Processes logistics present in humanitarian assistance. organization: supply management (purchases and donations), storage management, distribution and last-mile logistics, characterizing them and identifying the information necessary to know the agents involved in the system and the practices carried out during the operation of the supply chain of relief of the organization in regular and pandemic periods, based on the information provided by the actors who had some type of direct contact with the organization, collected through different proposed research techniques (interviews, surveys and field visits). Subsequently, the logistical challenges are identified based on primary information collection methods and the analysis of the information provided by the Food Bank of Bogotá, for each of the aforementioned logistical processes. In this way, the document concludes by providing key information guidelines for the design of an improvement plan in light of the information obtained previously, for the planning of logistics processes in response to emergencies for the organization. It presents a set of lessons learned and proposals for improvement that include planning, acquisition, transportation, storage, monitoring and volunteering in the organization based on the case study of the Food Bank of Bogotá during the 2020-2021 pandemic period, with a series of ideas that can be generalized to humanitarian organizations that are aligned with the objectives and strategies of the country's food banks and that are part of the ABACO network (Association of Food Banks of Colombia).