Inventory Management in Blood Supply Chain: Future Research Challenges and Opportunities

Nowadays, the awareness of the value of healthcare systems management has increased, due to facing an important number of pandemics, disasters either with natural causes or anthropogenic ones. In this paper, the blood supply chain (BSC), a crucial part of the healthcare system, will be analyzed, since lack of blood or its insufficient causes an enormous direct impact on patients' lives and medicine production. Therefore, every hospital must ensure proper logistic management to avoid shortage or wastage. Indeed, this paper discusses BSC inventory which is an important strategic element in this logistic chain. The real challenge in BSC management is the uncertainty of the demand and the raw material availability, considering the only suppliers of blood products are the donors, and its demand is hard to estimate since it is related to the medical case's needs. Therefore, the objective of the proposed paper is to analyze the logistics and supply chain of blood product inventory, with the aim of enhancing awareness and understanding of the challenges, costs, disaster impacts, and current optimization methods associated with blood inventory management. Additionally, the paper examines existing studies to identify unexplored opportunities and to suggest constructive future research directions for the optimization of inventory management logistics.