Selecting a provider as the most important step in building a cold chain in Pharmaceutical Logistics

The new realities, such as increased regulatory requirements, introduction of new gene and cellular therapies, and expectations of such therapies to be more affordable in healthcare facilities, require building a cold chain, which is very flexible and more reliable. Finding the most suitable provider of logistics services is an important part of building a cold chain for the pharmaceutical products supply. Selecting a logistics service provider is a decision-making process based on a few criteria and associated with the optimization of conflicting goals, such as quality, cost, and delivery time. A system to support decision on selecting a logistics service provider is suggested in this article, based on the method of analytical hierarchy process (AHP), which is widely used to solve multicriteria tasks. A case study is conducted by the example of a pharmaceutical industry manufacturer in order to validate the choice of the AHP model and to justify the conceptual design of the system to support decision on selecting a logistics service provider.