Influenza vaccine supply chain with vaccination promotion effort and its coordination

Transforming COVID-19 vaccines into vaccination : Challenges and opportunities for management scientists

Amid the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, the miraculous breakthroughs of multiple effective and safe COVID-19 vaccines offer hopeful prospects. Yet, the endgame of the pandemic is not vaccines; it is vaccination. The daunting challenge of vaccinating the world offers ample investigative opportunities for management scientists who are interested in improving the efficiency and equity of vaccine supply chains. In this article, we provide a brief overview of these opportunities through three constituent parts: (1) supply, (2) demand, and (3) matching supply with demand.

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

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.