Operational Decisions and Sustainability: A Brazilian Case of a Drugs Distribution Center

Abstract

Recently, the supply chain in the pharmaceutical sector, which is important economically to the healthcare industry worldwide, has received special attention owing to different factors involved in the distribution of drugs. Furthermore, it has an important role in global sustainability as organizations base their efficient decisions on the results from performance analysis of economic indicators. Thus, the sustainability of operations decisions must be analyzed to achieve better decision efficiency. This study integrates analytical methods of operational activities evaluation for a drug distribution center in a pharmaceutical logistic organization to analyze the sustainability of its operations. Furthermore, a proposed framework incorporates time variability management (TVM) decisions into a trade-off analysis of triple bottom-line (TBL) sustainability dimensions and operations managers’ decisions. The framework is a real-time data-gathering decision system that evaluates processes using stochastic simulation and process efficacity based on control-chart analysis and analyzes the trade-off performance. Managers’ decisions on time variability is modeled using an Analytical Hierarchy Process. The results of the trade-off analysis of sustainability and TVM indicate that economic dimensions have a higher impact on an organization than social and environmental dimensions. Managers assume that social and environmental impacts are less important to organizations’ performance. Environmental and social dimensions have different impacts on time variability decisions, where managers assume that operations’ time reduction has more impact on the social dimension, while operations’ time increase has a higher environmental impact. Thus, the framework is an effective tool for analyzing the sustainability of operations decisions, which is associated with variability analysis.