Lean and Green Modelling in Healthcare Supply Chains: The Case of Massive COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution

Abstract

In more than 100 years, the first global pandemic COVID-19 has proliferated all over the world at an unprecedented speed. The biopharmaceutical industry is moving fast to discovering a vaccine while governments scaling up to overcome the complex task of a global vaccination program. Now the race is on to organize supply chains to distribute billions of vaccines around the world. The logistic of the distribution vaccine requires a huge amount of people, transportation equipment, and storage equipment for low temperatures to handle the highly perishable vaccine. The process requires a just-in-time environment to get the population as fast as possible, in the right conditions for each one of the individuals that need to take the vaccine. This is huge shipping, transportation, and distribution challenge. It inspired us to reflect on the requirements of a massive COVID-19 vaccine distribution; and to contribute to the process improvement, adapting previous research work on lean and green supply chain modelling. Considering the high number of challenges, this work intends to develop a lean and green model for the healthcare supply chain. An overview of developing the coronavirus vaccine supply chain, identifying and systematizing recent trends, and the impact of COVID-19 on global supply chain management is considered. How lean and green supply chain practices can help in the vaccine supply chain.