Prioritizing the vaccine supply chain issues of developing countries using an integrated ISM-fuzzy ANP framework

Abstract

Purpose Delivering vaccines to the children who need them requires a supply chain that is efficient and effective. In most of the developing countries, however, the unknown and unresolved supply chain issues are causing inefficiencies in distributing vaccines. There is, therefore, a great need in such countries to recognize the issues that cause delays in vaccine delivery. With this purpose, the present study aims to identify and analyze the key issues in the supply chain of basic vaccines required to immunize children in developing countries. Design/methodology/approach Based on a field survey of three states of India, in-depth review of relevant literature and experts’ opinions, 25 key issues were recognized as factors of the vaccine supply chain (VSC) and categorized into five main domains. Using integrated interpretive structural modeling and fuzzy analytic network process approaches, the issues have been prioritized to determine their relative importance in the VSC. In addition, a sensitivity analysis has been performed to investigate the priority stability of the issues. Findings The results of the analysis show that among the five domains of VSC issues, the economic domain with a weight of 0.4262 is the most important domain, followed by the management (0.2672), operational (0.2222), environmental (0.0532) and social (0.0312). Research limitations/implications This study focuses on the prioritization of VSC issues; therefore, the results of the present study can provide direction to the decision-makers of immunization programs of developing countries in driving their efforts and resources on eliminating the most important obstacles to design successful vaccination programs. Originality/value To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is first to provide a direction to the decision-makers in identifying and managing important issues through the use of an analytical approach.

An equitable and accessible vaccine supply chain network in the epidemic outbreak of COVID-19 under uncertainty

“…The findings proved that the system would go toward chaos or miss stability if the decision delay passed a specific threshold. Chandra and Kumar ( 2019 ) tried to recognize and investigate the vaccine supply chain’s critical issues for immunizing kids in developing countries.…”

A fuzzy multi-criteria framework to identify barriers and enablers of the next-generation vaccine supply chain

“…The CI is formulated as CI=(λmax−n)/(n−1); n is 15 and RI is 1.59. The CR for each of the fuzzy pairwise comparison matrix is less than 0.1, indicating the consistency of the decisions (Chandra and Kumar, 2019).…”

Challenges in the implementation of circular economy in manufacturing industry

“…Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is a technique which consists of setting criteria, evaluation of criteria weights and execution of a ranking method (Opricovic and Tzeng, 2003). MCDM techniques such as AHP, analytic network process (ANP), Vlse Kriterijumska OptimizacijaI Kompromisno Resenje, technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), elimination and choice expressing reality and preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluation have been used in the past to rank the factors but none of the techniques can classify the factors into cause and effect groups (Chandra and Kumar, 2020;Khalilzadeh et al, 2020;Rashidi, 2020). DEMATEL is used as a MCDM technique as this approach can transform the cause and effect relationship of the factors into an intelligent structural model of the system (Tian et al, 2019).…”