A Sustainable Production Recovery Model with Responsiveness in Demand and Quality Consideration during COVID-19 Crisis

Document Type : Article

Authors

1 Department of Operational Research, Faculty of Mathematical Sciences, New Academic Block University of Delhi, Delhi, India

2 Department of Operational Research, Faculty of Mathematical Sciences, University of Delhi, India

3 Department of Operational Research, Faculty of Mathematical Sciences New Academic Block University of Delhi Delhi - 110 007, India

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in severe economic consequences across the globe. Businesses have adopted various approaches to handle the stress of drastic changes in how businesses and consumers behave altogether. The decisions regarding inventory policies are greatly affected by the production rates and volumes, hence during this pandemic, flexibility in production rates and volumes becomes a necessity to handle demand uncertainties. Another big challenge that comes upfront is about rebuilding trust cum awareness in consumers about safe production, services, and home deliveries through constant investment in advertisements. To achieve supreme standards of quality, the manufacturers cannot afford any chance to compromise the quality of the product being delivered. Hence, the paper employs two-stage rigorous inspection practices for the imperfect products that arise from the production process, the first inspection process being error-prone (delivering Type- I and Type-II errors) while the second one being perfect. The developed model maximizes the manufacturer’s total profit by optimizing the investment in service and advertisement with a flexible production rate. A numerical example and comprehensive sensitivity analysis are illustrated to support the pragmatism of the model.

Keywords