What I do

Rome is warm and sunny and does its best to welcome me back from Christmas vacation. Yesterday it was 42 degrees warmer than in my childhood town in Sweden. Unreal.

One of the main reasons of this blog is to use it as a job diary. I believe it can be useful in the end, as I’ll have to write a report of my time in Rome because of the scholarship I am receiving. So far I haven’t written much about my work, but today’s blog post is dedicated to this. Currently I am involved in about 10-20 projects, and here I’ll briefly present a few of them.

As mentioned earlier, I am involved in rolling out a new fleet management system. In this project, I am primarily responsible for creating a system for common IDs of truck spare parts, for example to facilitate cross-checking between warehouses. Currently I am outlining the requirements of this solution, in terms of time frame and what must be provided by the country offices.

Furthermore, I am continuing work on new fleet renewal/expansion strategies. It is quite complicated to find funding for truck procurement in an organization such as WFP, as donations often are earmarked for special operations and a short time frame. Therefore, large long-time investments such as trucks procurements can be complicated. Earlier I have written concept notes on the long-term perspective, i.e. strategies for replacing trucks procured from now on. Right now I am working on solutions applicable in the near future, and pros and cons of different options in various scenarios (such as emergency operations, new projects, renewal of current fleet, etc.). I find this project very interesting as it is concrete and gives a good insight in the problems created by the restrictions a humanitarian organization faces; the financial perspective is certainly quite different from the commercial sector.

Third, I am currently brainstorming concepts for decreasing the environmental impact of our truck operations. I am studying policies, initiatives and solutions of other UN organizations, our partners and the commercial sector, in order to learn and find best practices. From this material I try to see what is applicable to us, what we need to find out to move on, etc. This is very stimulating as it is tightly connected to my environmental interest and I feel I can contribute with new knowledge to the unit.

I am also working on the business requirements of a tool related to the truck database I finished in December. We are trying to develop a simple tool that can assist fleet managers in all other country offices in case they are interested in purchasing new trucks. Step-by-step the tool shall tell the user if there is a valid need for truck procurements, what trucks are available for what price, the resulting extra running costs implicated by truck fleet augmentation and realistic options for financing. Hopefully, such a tool can provide the user with a quick holistic view of truck procurement and its implications.