Global supply chain planning for pharmaceuticals
The shortening of patent life periods, generic competition and public health policies, among other factors, have changed the operating context of the pharmaceutical industry. In thisworkwe address a dynamic allocation/planning problem that optimises the global supply chain planning of a pharmaceutical company, from production stages
at primary and secondary sites to product distribution to markets. The model explores different production and distribution costs and tax rates at different locations in order to maximise the company’s net profit value (NPV. Large instances of the model are not solvable in realistic time scales, so two decomposition algorithms were developed.
In the first method, the supply chain is decomposed into independent primary and secondary subproblems, and each of them is optimised separately. The second algorithm is a temporal decomposition, where the main problem
is separated into several independent subproblems, one per each time period. These algorithms enable the solution of large instances of the problem in reasonable time with good quality results.