Planning and scheduling in pharmaceutical supply chains

Abstract

The global pharmaceutical industry is grappling with tremendous turmoil in the marketplace and dramatically changing competitive landscape. Fierce market competition, peaking patent cliffs, mounting R&D costs, shrinking product pipelines and stringent regulatory protocols have brought a complete paradigm shift in the way pharmaceutical enterprises operate. Here, we identify a number of critical challenges in supply chain operations and managerial decision making and propose methods to address them. The focus is mainly on developing appropriate decision-support models and tools to address challenges that assist long-term planning decisions. We present a few mathematical models and tools that assist production and operational planning for either a single pharmaceutical plant or an entire global enterprise. The comprehensiveness of our approach and models in considering a close to real problem with scenarios such as multiple products, changeovers, maintenance, new product introductions, transfer prices, duties, taxes, safety stocks, and shelf?lives makes them industrially useful.