Analysis of issues of generic medicine supply chain using fuzzy AHP: a Pilot study of Indian public drug distribution scheme

What is it about?

Integrated supply chain in pharmaceutical industry requires organized planning and modeling of each strategic element of Pharmaceutical Supply Chain (PSC). The aim of this work is to coordinate each activity of PSC and design a robust strategy which can make a system hassle-free. Each activity of an industry is considered as interdependent i.e. follows some co-relations with each other. Four most significant PSC issues have been identified and weightages of these issues and their sub issues are analyzed with respect to costs and time consumed to manage whole chain of supply. Fuzzy AHP methodology has been applied to rank the issues which consume maximum time and/or costs. The derived result shows that warehouse design and management (WDM) consumes more than one third of the total time and around half of the total cost. Other than WDM, process of supplier selection for procurement is the second most time and cost consuming issue. The derived results are discussed and supplied to the field experts of the area. The analysis will be useful for decision makers to economize PSC.

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