Applying Greenfield Analysis for Optimal Planning of COVID-19 Vaccination Outreach: A Case Study of Bali Province

ABSTRACT

A key strategy to winning the war against the COVID-19 pandemic involves acquiring sufficient vaccination coverage of the population to attain herd immunity. Such a task is highly daunting for many countries, especially for those whose significant portions of the population have limited access to vaccination services. One way to overcome this challenge is by implementing an outreach program, which involves setting up new outreach sites in remote and sparsely populated areas to improve the vaccination access for people residing there. This paper presents a novel approach to the planning of such outreach sites systematically and optimally. Our approach comprises a two-step Greenfield Analysis (GFA) procedure implemented using supply chain design software. The first step involves the design of the vaccination network to find the number and location of outreach sites that maximize the vaccination coverage for people residing within a threshold distance from the outreach sites. This is followed by the design of the vaccine supply network between the health centers and the outreach sites to determine the required vaccine doses that need to be kept at the vaccination sites. The required number of vaccinators and their ancillary supply kits can also be determined accordingly based on the supply network. We have tested our approach on a case study involving the COVID-19 vaccination scheme for Bali Province in Indonesia. We obtained the optimal number and locations of outreach sites for each regency in Bali and the whole province. © 2022 Operations and Supply Chain Management Forum. All rights reserved.