HERMES
Highly Extensible Resource for Modeling Event-Driven Supply Chains
HERMES (Highly Extensible Resource for Modeling Event-Driven Supply Chains) is a user-friendly software program that can help people within Health Ministries, vaccine supply chain logisticians, vaccine manufacturers and funders understand and optimize supply chains. This project has been funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. To date, HERMES has been used in a wide range of countries, including Niger, Benin, Senegal, Chad, Kenya, Mozambique, Thailand, Vietnam, and India. These projects have included working with various Ministries of Health and major international organizations such as UNICEF, Gavi, Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), Medicins Sans Fronties (MSF) otherwise known as Doctors Without Borders (MSF), PATH and the World Health Organization (WHO).
New research presented a novel adaption of HERMES to the context of agricultural and food supply chains (HERMES Agrifood) in Odisha, India which serves as an exemplar of supply chain challenges in many low-resource settings. HERMES Agrifood incorporates several additions compared to the original model, including the ability to support bidirectional trade within a supply chain level. HERMES Agrifood simulated the movement, availability, and loss of vegetables through agricultural and food supply chains in Odisha to better understand if supply chains in low-resource settings can handle a heightened crop yield.
Our study “When Increasing Vegetable Production May Worsen Food Availability Gaps: A simulation model in India” published in Food Policy shows the “more is better" approach to food production can lead to unnecessary food waste if we aren't also investing in supply chain infrastructure and coordination. Results from the HERMES Agrifood model found that in some cases increased vegetable production in Odisha, India led to even less food availability for consumers as the supply chain became overwhelmed and contributed to food waste. What drove this food waste was not just increases in food production but a lack of infrastructure such as cold storage, investment in the supply chain’s emergent communication, coordination, and trade pathways to help connect products to the consumer.
