Antecedents to buyer-supplier coordination in the pharmaceutical supply chain

System dynamics model for an agile pharmaceutical supply chain during COVID‑19 pandemic in Iran

Unpredictable changes in the current business environment have made organizations pay attention to the concept of agility. This concept is a key feature to survive and compete in turbulent markets while considering customers' fluctuating needs. An organization's agility is a function of its supply chain's agility. The present study offers a System Dynamics (SD) model for Iran's Pharmaceutical Supply Chain (PSC). The model is presented in three steps. First, the Supply Chain (SC) indicators were extracted based on theoretical foundations and literature review results. Second, an SD model of the PSC was extracted in the context of the COVID‑19 pandemic with the necessary analyses. Finally, the desired outputs and strategies were obtained by conducting a case study. The results indicated that the PSC's highest agility could be guaranteed by the simultaneous implementation of three strategies: investment, Human Capital Development (HCD), and accelerated completion of ongoing projects on a priority basis. According to these results, the organization had better determine the amount of capital and workforce required for ongoing projects, then design funding solutions to implement these projects and implement them according to the projects' priority.

Drugs quality supervision strategy of different distribution channels in pharmaceutical supply chain

Aiming at the dual-channel pharmaceutical supply chain, which consists of two distribution channels, offline medical institutions, and online e-commerce platforms, and taking into account the impact of different strategic choices made by relevant stakeholders on the drugs quality of different distribution channels, this article constructs an evolutionary game model involving the participation of government regulator, pharmaceutical enterprises, medical institutions, and pharmaceutical e-commerce companies. The stable equilibrium points of each participant's strategic choices are solved; the stability of strategic combination is analyzed by Lyapunov's first method, and MATLAB 2020b is used for simulation to verify the influence of each decision variable on the strategic choice of different participants. The results show that, first, the purpose of punishment is to ensure the drugs quality in the pharmaceutical supply chain, but when the fine is too high, it will restrain the economic behavior of pharmaceutical enterprises, which is not conducive to the performance of social responsibilities by other relevant participants. Second, the probability that government regulator strictly supervises the pharmaceutical supply chain and the probability that pharmaceutical enterprises provide high-quality drugs are negatively related to their additional cost. Third, whether medical institutions and pharmaceutical e-commerce companies choose inspection is affected by multiple factors such as inspection cost, sales price, and sales cost. Furthermore, when the penalty for non-inspection of pharmaceutical e-commerce companies is greater than the threshold F _m0, it can ensure that it chooses an inspection strategy. Finally, this article puts forward countermeasures and suggestions on the drugs quality supervision of different distribution channels in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

Investigating the performance of the sustainable cold supply chain in the pharmaceutical industry

Purpose

This study focuses on identifying potential challengers affecting cold chain performance in the pharmaceutical industry. Considering the history of humanity, every pandemic experienced could only be controlled with the vaccine found. While the world is fighting the unforgettable epidemic called COVID-19, scientists are also working to find the therapeutic vaccine. The vaccines studied have different temperature storage and transport properties. In the pharmaceutical industry, it is necessary to know and analyse every step of the cold supply chain to provide the most appropriate and safe cooling level. In addition, it is important to understand the relationship between all the facilities, equipment, tools and materials needed to avoid mistakes along the chain.

Design/methodology/approach

Hence, this study focuses on identifying potential challengers affecting sustainable cold supply chain performance in the pharmaceutical industry and proposing a conceptual framework that involves these main challengers. In this study, firstly, different main and sub-factors are defined from the literature, and fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory method is applied to analyse the causal link between these factors for an effective application.

Findings

Results showed that packaging, transportation and shipping, storage specifications and handling practices, inventory management, technical issues and delivery delay are the most affected factors during the sustainable cold supply chain performance in the pharmaceutical industry. This study offers both managerial implications and a roadmap that are designed with a holistic view to guide manufacturer, logistics parties and even policymakers.

Originality/value

Some of the studies related to the pharmaceutical industry are monitoring and controlling the temperature in the cold supply chain steps; the other part is the studies where the chain steps are examined with a focus on production or transportation. While these issues are the focus, the requirements and conditions of each stage of the supply chain must be studied for a safe, effective and sustainable cold chain beyond the current global pandemic crisis. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that highlights identifying the potential challengers that affect cold supply chain performance for the pharmaceutical industry both theoretically and empirically, solving the causal relationships among these challengers and designing a holistic framework.

Logistic planning for pharmaceutical supply chain using multi-objective optimization model

Purpose

Appropriate logistic planning for the pharmaceutical supply chain can significantly improve many financial and performance aspects. To this aim, a multi-objective optimization model is proposed in this paper that considers different types of pharmaceuticals, different vehicles with determining capacities and multi-period logistic planning. This model can be updated based on new information about resources and newly identified requests.

Design/methodology/approach

The main objective function of the proposed model in this paper is minimizing the unsatisfied prioritized requests for pharmaceuticals in the network. Besides, the total transportation activities of different types of vehicles and related costs are considered as other objectives. Therefore, these objectives are optimized hierarchically in the proposed model using the Lexicographic method. This method finds the best value for the first objective function. Then, it tries to optimize the second objective function while maintaining the optimality of the first objective function. The third objective function is optimized based on the optimality of other objective functions, as well. A non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II-multi-objective particle swarm optimization heuristic method is designed for this aim.

Findings

The performances of the proposed model were analyzed in different cases and its results for different problems were shown within the framework of a case study. Besides, the sensitivity analysis of results shows the logical behavior of the proposed model against various factors.

Practical implications

The proposed methodology can be applied to find the best logistic plan in real situations.

Originality/value

In this paper, the authors have tried to use a multi-objective optimization model to guide and correct the pharmaceutical supply chain to deal with the related requests. This is important because it can help managers to improve their plans.