National Drug Stockout Risks in Africa: Analysis of the Global Fund Disbursement Process for Procurement from 2002 to 2013​

Despite substantial financial aid from international donors for procurement of health products, stockouts of life-saving drugs related to prevalent infectious diseases are still widespread in Africa. Addressing the lack of research on why these stockouts occur, we study the relationship between The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and its grant recipients. Specifically, we leverage extensive historical fund disbursement and drug procurement data to build a discrete-event simulation model predicting the joint impact of procurement and grant disbursement processes on national drug availability for the Global Fund’s recipient countries in Africa. This model is validated against cumulative stockout levels inferred from historical grant implementation lengths, and used to evaluate potential high-level modifications of disbursement or procurement processes. Results show the existence of substantial intrinsic stockout risks in many countries, due to the unpredictability of fund disbursements and the frequency of grant performance monitoring performed by the Global Fund. Interventions increasing fund disbursement levels to protect against disbursement timing uncertainty are predicted to be more effective than others that include regional buffer stocks and bridge financing.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107445/1/1241_Yadav.pd

Theoretical and practical ramifications of altering the amount of sorts required from an outbound dock

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division; in conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-90).Amazon has been enjoying a rapid pace of growth over the last few years. One unfortunate side effect of this growth is the overall increased complexity of the network Amazon utilizes to deliver packages from the Amazon warehouses (coined "fulfillment centers" or "FCs") to the final customers. Specifically, Amazon now requires the outbound docks of the FCs to handle more volume that needs to be delivered to more locations. The increased number of outbound locations necessitates more package sorting operations on the dock. This thesis focuses on the operation of the outbound docks and performs time studies, capacity analyses, various warehouse case studies, and discrete event simulations to discover the ultimate bottleneck of a dock as more of these sorts are added. This sorting capacity analysis uncovers that the space available on a dock as an inventory buffer between the sorting and truck loading operations to ultimately be the source of constraint as more sorts are required from a building. This buffer constraint is then explored and quantified to create a mathematical formulation for estimating the ultimate outbound sorting capacity of an FC. Given the max sorting capacity of an FC, this thesis then dives in to the practical applications of operations management principles for executing on a sort plan. The principles of minimizing non-value added work, optimizing the number of packages going through the most labor efficient process paths, worker interference on labor efficiencies, and employing flexible capacity will be explored and applied to the outbound dock.by Matthew O. Kasenga.S.M.M.B.A