A Framework Development and Assessment for Cold Supply Chain Performance System: A Case of Vaccines

Abstract

Vaccines supply chain is the soul for the success of immunization program in any developing or developed country. A poor performing vaccine cold chain will result into failure of immunization program and may cause millions of death from vaccine-preventable diseases. In this research work, an attempt has been made to identify the key performance factors (criteria) which are responsible for reduced performance of vaccines cold supply chain. So far, many researches have been done to identify these performance factors of vaccines cold supply chain performance but the questions such as how these factors will affect the performance, what will be the relationship among them, and what will the best possible solutions to tackle these concerns are not answered systematically. This paper provides systematic answers to these questions. In order to visualize the effect of these performance factors on the of vaccines supply chain and to suggest the best possible alternative, the whole research work is divided into three segment—in the first segment Delphi method has been used to select the most critical factors and best possible alternatives (eight criteria and five alternatives) for the performance of vaccine cold chain, in the second segment research work propose AHP approach to find out the priority weights of selected criteria, and in the third segment TOPSIS approach has been used to provide the ranking for selected alternatives. The results of the research work show that the criteria ‘vaccine instability’ is most critical and should be taken into consideration at first while establishing the benchmarks for vaccines cold chain. The results of the research work also show that the alternative ‘continuous monitoring of vaccine cold chain functionality status’ can be adopted as the best solution to improve the performance of vaccines cold supply chain.