The increasingly global context in which businesses operate supports innovation, but also increases uncertainty around supply chain disruptions. The COVID-19 pandemic clearly shows the lack of resilience in supply chains and the impact that disruptions may have on a global network scale as individual supply chain connections and nodes fail. This cascading failure underscores the need for the network analysis and advanced resilience analytics we find lacking in the existing supply chain literature. This paper reviews supply chain resilience literature that focuses on resilience modeling and quantification and connects the supply chain to other networks, including transportation and command and control. We observe a fast increase in the number of relevant papers (only 47 relevant papers were published in 2007-2016, while 94 were found in 2017-2019). We observe that specific disruption scenarios are used to develop and test supply chain resilience models, while uncertainty associated with threats including consideration of "unknown unknowns" remains rare. Publications that utilize more advanced models often focus just on supply chain networks and exclude associated system components such as transportation and command and control (C2) networks, which creates a gap in the research that needs to be bridged. The common goal of supply chain modeling is to optimize efficiency and reduce costs, but trade-offs of efficiency and leanness with flexibility and resilience may not be fully addressed. We conclude that a comprehensive approach to network resilience quantification encompassing the supply chain in the context of other social and physical networks is needed to address the emerging challenges in the field. The connection to systemic threats, such as disease pandemics, is specifically discussed.
PurposeDespite 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/approachSystematic 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.FindingsPharmaceutical 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/valueThis 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.
Pharmaceutical companies, upstream suppliers, associated logistics providers, health workers, regulatory agencies, public health experts and ultimately the medical practitioners and general public have been navigating an increasingly globalized vaccine supply chain; any disruption to the supply chain may cause cascading failure and have devastating consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic has already highlighted the lack of resilience in supply chains, as global networks fail from disruptions at single nodes and connections. As the race for a COVID-19 vaccine continues, the importance of not only an efficient supply chain but a resilient vaccine supply chain capable of reliable production and reaching target populations despite likely but currently unknown disruptions is imperative. Proactively applying resilience analytics to vaccine supply chain models will increase the probability that vaccination programs meet their goals. Without such a network in place for manufacture and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine, even the most efficacious and safe vaccine will not prove viable.
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