A two stage DEA approach for evaluating the performance of public pharmaceutical products supply chains

Abstract

Evaluating the performance of supply chains is one of the most important and complex tasks that managers encounter. This paper presents a performance evaluation framework to evaluate and compare the performance of different pharmaceutical products supply chains according to several features. The framework is based on Data Envelopment Analysis as a dynamic tool for measuring the relative efficiency of supply chains with multiple inputs and outputs. The objectives of this study are (a) to construct a set of aggregated metrics that best characterize the performance of pharmaceutical products supply chains, (b) to estimate the relative efficiency and compare different public pharmaceutical products supply chains, and finally (c) to estimate the magnitudes of input adjustments that would have been required to make each supply chain efficient.