Ecosystem modelling and decision-making within a supply chain environment

In the dynamic pharmaceutical branch, understanding the market is a critical capability to be competitive and ensure long-term business sustainability. As supply chains in this branch are large and are faced with the challenges of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, decision-makers can barely grasp what is going on within a reasonable timeframe. Therefore, new decision-supporting solutions are desirable. By supporting the decision-making of responsible subject matter experts, risks can be minimized or in the best case, even be eliminated.

Throughout the research, the aim was the development of a market model by integrating research topics such as supply chain and operations management, decision-making, simulation modelling, and pricing. Moreover, an ecosystem approach was used to explore the internal and external stakeholders who need to be involved in the model.

During this research, several insights were revealed and thus many important implications were developed on how to henceforth proceed. One of these insights was, that the data available was not comprehensive enough to develop a market model. Consequently, the course of action shifted towards proposing a gamified version of the model, using the knowledge of subject matter experts, and establish a best practice.