XVIIIECDS2020 Presentation
Channel: Dr. Mohammad Shamsuddoha
Date: 09/10/2020

Unpredictable supply-demand in the COVID 19 situation: A Simulation Study 

Covid-19 perspective is utterly new to the world since December 2019. It has changed millions of views in different fields like operations and productions, supply chain, customer services, and the likes. Typically, this COVID19 situation is introduced to everyone as abnormal, and people have to think and adjust to the new normal situation in their daily lives to maintain optimum safety.

The livestock sector globally is highly dynamic in general and volatile in particular. In developing countries like Bangladesh, it is growing in response to the rapidly increasing demand
for livestock products like dairy milk. The growth was consistently vertical for the last two decades. According to Dhaka Tribune, the annual per capita milk consumption stands at only
27.31 grams or ml in Bangladesh, which increased to around 35-40 ml (according to the livestock official). Milk consumption in many poor and developing countries, more precisely the
neighboring countries, is higher than in Bangladesh. For example, it is 68.7 liters/person/year in India, in Nepal 41liters, in Maldives 79 liters, in Pakistan 159 liters, while in Bangladesh, it is only 9.9 ml or grams, as per the BBS survey report. Approximately five million people are directly involved with this sub-sector having fifty thousand households or SME entrepreneurs.
Unfortunately, this sub-sector is stumbling a lot to match the actual supply and demand conditions in the last 3-4 years. The demand is highly inconsistent due to various propagandas, contamination of chemical and water, disease outbreak and feed contaminations, antibiotic usage, and the likes. In fact, people are trying to find an alternative to sources of dairy milk from powdered milk originated from Europe and elsewhere. Recently, dairy farmers are trying to be
united and committed to produce quality milk and supply the same to the customers. They improved a lot with gaining customer confidence having thousands of bottlenecks in their
process. Now, dairy farmers are struggling to know real-life demand situations to deal with the appropriate supplies duet the Coronavirus outbreak. Their productions are getting perished and spoiled due to the lack of supply chain under lockdown circumstances. They do not have a different processing unit to save their productions. In this situation, they are losing their capital due to overproductions in comparison to the real need, whereas real productions needed to be
improved to meet minimum per capita requirements. The researcher is planning to develop a
simulation model with all possible effects of vulnerable variables, including COVID19. Such a
model can forecast the real demands by impacting unstable variables in the model. The farmers
thus visualize the scenarios and take the decision of what they needed to do. A remarkable research gap exists in understanding vulnerable variables to assess final demands and supplies.
This research proposes a supply chain model, which includes the concept of efficient production planning with most impacting variables to regulate the demand situations of the dairy sub-sector
in Bangladesh. Perceptibly, the model is going to consider real-life situations along with new-normal production planning aspects. 

This approach has the potential of creating new windows for developing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that will have the ability to make the right decisions on how much product is needed for the existing situations. In such a way, farmers can protect over and under productions, situation to save their business and eliminate capital losses. 
Vensim simulation tool will be used to develop the model and simulate a wide range of variables like vulnerable variables like government policies, repetitive natural catastrophes, customer
distrust, disease outbreak, excessive antibiotic usage, hazardous growth promoter usage, inconsistent market price, and other essential variables. 

The researcher is expecting that this model could be convenient for the market planner to control their supply-demand situations and survive from economic disasters. Thus, the livestock sub-sector will be beneficial to identify the predicted results in advance to determine their pathway to achieve business success. So, the aim of this study is to propose an efficient simulation model for dealing with volatile demand-supply using a rigorous simulation model.

Key words — Livestock, Efficient Production Planning, Volatile demand, Dairy Productions, Supply chain, Simulation Modeling