Analysing supply chain coordination mechanisms dealing with repurposing challenges during Covid-19 pandemic in an emerging economy: a multi-layer decision making approach

Following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a serious need for the pharmaceutical industry to combat the disease more quickly and effectively. In this regard, numerous companies set out to repurpose current drugs. The noticed decision has major challenges in various dimensions, including the creation and management of an efficient supply chain. The present study attempts to examine the significance and relationships of the repurposing challenges and analyze the effectiveness of supply chain coordination contracts confronting them. In this regard, a combination of Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Analytic Network Process (ANP) named DANP method is applied to investigate the relationships and extracting the weights of the mentioned challenges and the multi-criteria optimization and compromise solution technique called VIKOR is employed to prioritize the supply chain coordination contracts found on their impact facing with repurposing challenges. The mentioned techniques have been conducted under the condition of linguistic Z-numbers. The results demonstrated that financial support and digitalization are the most influential challenges. Moreover, collaboration and data availability have the most weight. In addition, four contracts including effort sharing, cost-sharing, credit option and buyback are the best contracts that companies in the merging economy of Iran should concentrate on them. This research proposes a novel framework of decision-making by integrating DANP and VIKOR with linguistic Z-numbers. Additionally, this study takes a new look at the use of coordination contracts from the viewpoint of repurposing challenges which is highlighted particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.