Blood supply chain challenges: Evidence from Indonesia

This paper aims to identify and structure challenges and opportunities for improving Indonesian blood supply chain management. Nowadays, Indonesian blood supply chain is operated by using a decentralization approach. Blood bank is one of the echelons in blood supply chain. A Blood Transfusion Unit (BTU) is a blood bank organized by the Indonesian Red Cross (IRC). An exploratory approach is used to collect empirical evidence in Indonesian blood supply chain. Furthermore, SWOT method is employed to map the identified problems and the improvement opportunities. This research conclude that the main problems in the blood supply chains emerged at the level of the BTU. Many BTUs experienced a high risk of having expired products as well as inventory shortages. The possible causes of those issues are high supply uncertainty, high demand uncertainty, and perishable characteristics of blood bag product. The three factors become challenges faced by BTU of IRC. The solution proposed for the BTU to overcome this challenge is to initiate collaborative actions among the BTUs. This collaboration should be conducted in planning process at operational level. Therefore, the future work is to build collaboration models for improving the blood management system, which consider the uniqueness of social demographic of Indonesia.