1,657 research outputs found

    Improving healthcare supply chains and decision making in the management of pharmaceuticals

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    The rising cost of quality healthcare is becoming an increasing concern. A significant part of healthcare cost is the pharmaceutical supply component. Improving healthcare supply chains is critical not only because of the financial magnitude but also because it impacts so many people. Efforts such as this project are essential in understanding the current operations of healthcare pharmacy systems and in offering decision support tools to managers struggling to make the best use of organizational resources. The purpose of this study is to address the objectives of a local hospital that exhibits typical problems in pharmacy supply chain management. We analyze the pharmacy supply network structure and the different, often conflicting goals in the decisions of the various stakeholders. We develop quantitative models useful in optimizing supply chain management and inventory management practices. We provide decision support tools that improve operational, tactical, and strategic decision making in the pharmacy supply chain and inventory management of pharmaceuticals. On one hand, advanced computerized technology that manages pharmaceutical dispensation and automates the ordering process offers considerable progress to support pharmacy product distribution. On the other hand, the available information is not utilized to help the managers in making the appropriate decisions and control the supply chain management. Quantitative methods are presented that provide simplified, practical solutions to pharmacy objectives and serve as decision support tools. For operational inventory decisions we provide the min and max par levels (reorder point and order up to level) that control the automated ordering system for pharmaceuticals. These parameters are based on two near-optimal allocation policies of cycle stock and safety stock under storage space constraint. For the tactical decision we demonstrate the influence of varying inventory holding cost rates on setting the optimal reorder point and order quantity for items. We present a strategic decision support tool to analyze the tradeoffs among the refill workload, the emergency workload, and the variety of drugs offered. We reveal the relationship of these tradeoffs to the three key performance indicators at a local care unit: the expected number of daily refills, the service level, and the storage space utilization

    A Stochastic Process Study of Two-Echelon Supply Chain with Bulky Demand Process Incorporating cost Sharing Coordination Strategies

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    This research considers a single-item two-echelon supply chain facing a sequence of stochastic bulky customer demand with random order inter-arrival time and random demand size. The demand process is a general renewal process and the cost functions for both parties involve the renewal function and its integral. The complexity of the general renewal function causes the computational intractability in deciding the optimal order quantities, so approximations for the renewal function and its integral are introduced to address the computational complexity. Asymptotic expansions are commonly used in the literature to approximate the renewal function and its integral when the optimal decisions are relatively large compared to the mean of the inter-renewal time. However, the optimal policies do not necessarily fall in the asymptotic region. So the use of asymptotic expansions to approximate the renewal function and its integral in the cost functions may cause significant errors in decision making. To overcome the inaccuracy of the asymptotic approximation, this research proposes a modified approximation. The proposed approximation provides closed form functions for the renewal function and its integral which could be applied to various optimization problems such as inventory planning, supply chain management, reliability and maintenance. The proposed approximations are tested with commonly used distributions and applied to an application in the literature, yielding good performance. By applying the proposed approximation method to the supply chain cost functions, this research obtains the optimal policies for the decentralized and the centralized cases. The numerical results provide insights into the cost savings realized by the centralization of the supply chain compared to the decentralized case. Furthermore, this research investigates coordination schemes for the decentralized case to improve the utilities of parties. A cost sharing mechanism in which the vendor offers the retailer a contract as a compensation of implementing vendordesired inventory policy is investigated. The sharing could be realized by bearing part of the retailer’s inventory holding cost or fixed cost. The contract is designed to minimize the vendors cost while satisfying the individual rationality of the retailer. Other forms of coordination mechanisms, such as the side payment and delayed payment, are also discussed

    Transshipment Problems in Supply ChainSystems: Review and Extensions

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