Systematic Approach to Manage Risks of Economically Motivated Food and Drug Adulteration in Supply Chains in China

Systematic Approach to Manage Risks of Economically Motivated Food and Drug Adulteration in Supply Chains in China

Retsef Levi
Sloan School of Management, MIT

Wednesday, February 3, 2016
4:00 - 5:30 PM
Location: Spilker 232

Abstract:

It is estimated that 15% of all food products consumed in the US are imported, whereas in some product class like seafood more than 80% is imported. Half of all medical devices used in the US are imported, while 80% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients in medications sold in the US are manufactured elsewhere. The overall number of shipments of FDA-regulated products into the US is growing at a rate of 13-15% percent a year, and is expected to reach over 100 million by year in 2015. China is currently the third largest importing source of food products into the US, the second largest importer of biomedical devices, the eight largest importer of drugs and biologics and the second largest importer of cosmetics. Over the last decade there have been very public incidents of economically motivated food and drug products manufactured in China that adversely affected China, the US and other developed countries. Moreover, the evolving global supply chains centered in China and the unique socio economic and regulatory environments in the country, have created a growing threat to food and drug safety in the US and other developed countries.

In this talk we will describe a multidisciplinary effort to develop a systematic risk management approach to manage risks related to these evolving threats. The approach attempts to bring together methodologies from Operations Research, supply chain management, bio-medical manufacturing, macroeconomics, regulatory sciences and machine learning to create a range of analytical tools and approaches that could inform risk identification, risk prioritization as well as effective management of scarce interventional capabilities. We will describe some in depth analysis of known adulteration incidents and some general insights, as well as large scale data-driven predictive models of supply chains analytics.

This is joint work with Amine Anoun, Yasheng Huang, Jim Leung, Anthony Sinskey, Stacy Springs, Shannon Stewart, Tauhid Zaman and Karen Zheng.

Operations Research Colloquia: http://or.stanford.edu/oras_seminars.html