Assessing technological impact on vaccine supply chain performance

Abstract

Purpose The study aims to develop an integrated quantitative approach and suggest a framework to assess the impact of a technological intervention on the internal process dimension of the vaccine supply chain (VSC) system for multiple administered regions.

Design/methodology/approach An evaluation index system is developed by selecting suitable performance indicators (PIs) that define the objectives of a VSC. Then multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) methods are applied to obtain pre and post-intervention relative ranks for the regions and performance scores of the objectives. A bilateral data envelopment analysis (DEA) compares significant efficiency differences between improvement and deterioration groups.

Findings This study demonstrates that technological intervention improves the internal process dimension of a VSC for the regions under consideration. The empirical study delivers two groups of regions showing improvement or deterioration in relative performance ranking due to the technological intervention. However, the efficiency-based bilateral comparison may reveal an insignificant difference between the two groups.

Practical implications Decision-makers associated with VSC will find the suggested model helpful in assessing the impact of technological intervention. They can easily identify specific objectives of VSC's internal process dimension, whether a particular region has observed an improvement or deterioration in its relative performance and maximize the outcome by focusing on the areas of concern for a specific region.

Originality/value This study is the first to provide a quantitative approach that empirically determines relative performance improvement or deterioration of different regions for a set of identified VSC objectives in the context of the Indian states.