Assessing technological impact on vaccine supply chain performance

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.