Analyzing pharmaceutical industry risks under uncertainty for performance improvement: an Indian scenario

Purpose - The pharmaceutical industry faces multiple risks that adversely affect its performance. Within these risks, some dependencies have been observed, which help in streamlining the mitigation efforts. Therefore, the present work identifies and categorizes various risks/sub-risks in cause-effect groups, considering uncertainty in the decision-making process. Design/methodology/approach - An extensive literature review and experts' opinions were utilized to identify and finalize the risks faced by the pharmaceutical industry. For further analysis, data collection was done using a questionnaire focusing on finalized risks. Based on the data, the causal relation under uncertainty between various risks/sub-risks was identified using a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique, i.e. intuitionistic fuzzy DEMATEL, in a pairwise manner. Findings - The results show that the three most prominent risk categories are operational, demand/customer/ market and financial. Also, out of the seven main risks, only supplier and operational are categorized within the effect group and the rest, i.e. financial, demand, logistics, political and technology within the cause group. The sub-risks within each category have also been categorized into cause-effect groups. The mitigation of cause group risks will help in economize the financial resources and improve the performance and resilience of the industry. Originality/value - There is insufficient research on identifying the causality among the pharmaceutical industry risks. Additionally, an extensive discussion on the identified cause-effect groups is also missing in the literature. Therefore, in this work, efforts have been made to determine the prominent risks for the Indian pharmaceutical industry that will be helpful for channelizing the resources to mitigate risks for a resilient industry.