Supply chain resilience for vaccines: review of modeling approaches in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic
Industrial Management & Data Systems
ISSN: 0263-5577
Article publication date: 18 May 2021
Issue publication date: 5 July 2021
Abstract
Purpose
Despite rapid success in bringing SARS-CoV-2 vaccines to distribution by multiple pharmaceutical corporations, supply chain failures in production and distribution can plague pandemic recovery. This review analyzes and addresses gaps in modeling supply chain resilience in general and specifically for vaccines in order to guide researchers and practitioners alike to improve critical function of vaccine supply chains in the face of inevitable disruptions.
Design/methodology/approach
Systematic review of the literature on modeling supply chain resilience from 2007 to 2020 is analyzed in tandem with the vaccine supply chain manufacturing literature. These trends are then used to apply a novel matrix analysis to seven Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) annual filings of pharmaceutical corporations involved in COVID-19 vaccine manufacture and distribution.
Findings
Pharmaceutical corporations favor efficiency as they navigate regulatory, economic and other threats to their vaccine supply chains, neglecting resilience – absorption, adaptation and recovery from inevitable and unexpected disruptions. However, explicitly applying resilience analytics to the vaccine supply chain and further leveraging emerging network science tools found in the academic literature, such as artificial intelligence (AI), stress tests and digital twins, will help supply chain managers to better quantify efficiency/resilience tradeoffs across all associated networks/domains and support optimal system performance post disruption.
Originality/value
This is the first review addressing resilience analytics in vaccine supply chains and subsequent extension to operational management through novel matrix analyses of SEC Filings. The authors provide analyses and recommendations that facilitate resilience quantification capabilities for vaccine supply chain managers, regulatory agencies and corporate stakeholders and are especially relevant for pandemic response, including application to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Profs. Jeff Keisler and Maksim Kitsak for their advice and guidance. The authors are grateful to Mr Pat Byrne of HHS/BARDA for helping them to realize the need and state of practice in the field. The authors are also grateful to the colleagues at HHS and FEMA Region 1 (Gary Kleinman, Sue Cibulsky, Melissa Surrette and many others) for countless days and nights they spent together helping to recover from the COVID crisis. This paper is based upon the work supported by the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center FLEX-4 Project on Systemic Resilience. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual authors and not those of the US Army or other sponsor organizations.
Citation
Golan, M.S., Trump, B.D., Cegan, J.C. and Linkov, I. (2021), "Supply chain resilience for vaccines: review of modeling approaches in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 121 No. 7, pp. 1723-1748. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-01-2021-0022
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited