Integrated supply chain planning for multinational pharmaceutical enterprises

Abstract

The management of global supply chains is highly complex and vital for multinational pharmaceutical enterprises. Global integrated planning in multi-site, multi-echelon network of a multinational company has attracted some academic interest. However, the focus has largely been on efficient solution strategies for large problems. In this work, we develop simple yet powerful MILP model for multi-period enterprise-wide planning. We represent the entire enterprise in a seamless fashion with a granularity of individual task campaigns on each production line. Our model integrates procurement, production, and distribution along with the effects of international tax differentials, inventory holding costs, material shelf-lives, waste treatment / disposal, and other real-life factors on the after-tax profit of the company. To demonstrate the performance of our model, we solve two example problems of planning multinational pharmaceutical enterprise. For our evaluation, we consider an industrial scale planning problem for a supply chain network consisting of 34 different entities and producing 9 different products, for a period of 5 years. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.