The Total Cost Of Ownership Of A Cold-Chain Vaccine Carrier Technology In Last-Mile Delivery: A Scoping Review

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a calculation used to illustrate the actual cost of buying and owning products and services. In this paper, we perform a scoping review aimed at understanding the TCO of technologies introduced in the last mile of the cold chain. The search is performed in Scopus, where the literature explored lies at the intersection of TCO models and frameworks, products service systems (PSS), and supply chain, value chain, or logistics application. We deliberately scoped broadly and refine towards PSS applications. We present the results of 20 publications meeting our inclusion criteria. The literature is largely produced by developed country authors, with a complete absence of African authors. A broad range of PSS were investigated, including airlines, telecommunications, commercial vehicles, tinting, machine tooling, electric and fuel vehicles for logistics and last-mile delivery, washing machines, renewable energy alternatives, and smallholder farming. Most of the publications developed TCO models for supplier selection, based on cost and other factors such as risk and reliability. Some developments focused on developing their TCO model beyond a cost calculator, and make contributions as decision support tools, negotiation tools, organizational tool, and a way to measure social impact. The scoping reviewed allowed us to identify activity-based cost categories to consider over the value chain of technologies introduced in the last mile of the cold chain.