Role of Information Technology on Supply Chain Management of Pharmaceutical Industry

Methodology

Using the key words, “SCM”, “supply chain management”, “information technology”, “IT”, “healthcare”, “role of IT”, “SCM of pharmaceutical industry”, “pharmaceutical industry”, “role of IT on SCM” and “role of IT on pharmaceutical industry” in a search of databases such as Google Scholar, EBSCO, Scopus and ScienceDirect, resulted in 190 published papers for review. Only papers pertaining to recent developments in SCM were considered, followed by papers involving developments in IT which affected SCM, and finally papers pertaining to pharma. We reviewed 69 papers on SCM to get insights into the recent practices of SCM, 65 papers on the developments of IT related to SCM, and 48 papers on the pharma industry. For each of the categories, new technologies and frameworks were investigated and research gaps were identified. Following is the year wise distribution of journals (Figure 1).