Efficiency Improvement of Blood Supply Chain System Using Taguchi Method and Dynamic Simulation

Abstract

The management of blood is a problem of specific concern for the human race. Even though there are technological developments in the field of substitutes for blood products, the need for donor blood and its derived products will always exist. Blood is not an ordinary commodity. The supply of donor blood is fairly irregular and the demand for blood products is at least as stochastic. Matching supply and demand in an efficient manner is not straightforward. Blood products are also perishable, which complicates things even further. Shortages lead to high costs for society, since they can cause increase mortality rates. The goal of this paper is applying dynamic simulation and Taguchi method to design a robust blood supply chain system to improve the blood supply chain efficiency. The National Blood Center (NBC) in Iran has been selected as the case of study. To do the Taguchi method, four main controllable factors that are arrival rate of donors, maximum inventory level, minimum inventory level and blood delivery policy and one noise factor which is demand variable have been chosen. Based on final result, to achieve a robust blood supply chain, all main factors should be located at the high level except for factor B. This means that arrival rate of donors, maximum inventory level and blood delivery policy should be equaled to 300, 1000 and LIFO, in case, the minimum inventory level should be equaled to 70 respectively to optimize the efficiency of the blood supply chain based on the patient safety.