Over the past academic year, from the events of Fall 2019, to the Covid-19 pandemic that ensued Lebanon in 2020, the Lebanese Red Cross was at the frontlines, selflessly helping maintain the health of people regardless of their political or economic backgrounds. Due to the importance of the Lebanese Red Cross as a non profit organization in Lebanon, a team from MSFEA’s Industrial Engineering Department chose to focus on optimizing it as their FYP. Magalie Aoun, Rayya Fahed, Isabelle Fayad and Rayan Hamdoun spent 2019 through 2020 working on assisting the Red Cross through a project that aims to optimize the allocation of rescuers to the different shifts in order to reach higher volunteer satisfaction and ultimately higher volunteer retention.

After developing the program, the team aimed to optimize the organization’s warehouse as well. They developed an offering policy for their most critical items which basically includes when to order and how much to order of each commodity in order to avoid shortages and high costs from overstocking the warehouse. They also redesigned the warehouse based on the ordering policy developed, space requirements and their previous and current consumption patterns in order to make the most use of the warehouse space in a way that benefits their operations. The central warehouse of LRC was redesigned using the ABC method. The product rearrangement resulted in a 31.4% improvement as compared to the old layout. They were able to rid the warehouse of the overstock supply piles that created a cumbersome setting and blocked the main entrance to the maintenance room.