Background: In the pharmaceutical industry, interactions between multiple stakeholders under a volatile and ambiguous environment, causes a complex task for the supply chain management (SCM). Particularly, several factors impact stakeholder behaviors. i.e., climate changes, promotions, prices, product availability, new releases, administrative complexity, and regulatory affairs. This complexity leads to uncertainty, causing wastefulness and inefficiency in supply chains. Consequently, several effects appear, including not only a reduced companies’ revenue, but also higher medicine prices for the population.
Method: We use the System Dynamics (SD) approach to model the complex relationships between stakeholders in the medicine supply chain considering the effects of real time data collection and inventory management as collaborative demand supported by industry 4.0.
This model considers Information asymmetries, inventory policies, purchasing strategies, minimum order quantities and real time data availability allowing us to understand how these attributes affect the supply chain. The model captures system feedback loops to improve their performance. e.g., planning, production, distribution, storage, and consumption.
Results: By using computational simulations, we studied the effects on the pharmaceutical supply chain inventory of managerial policies and public health. These simulations also revealed that combining policies from different supply echelons might have a stronger influence on capital expenditures.
Conclusion: The model shows the importance of using multiple policy combinations through the supply chain to improve product availability and reduce unnecessary medicine production and storage.
Therefore, logistics management will be improved based on timely information available and how better data driven decisions can be taken.