The drug logistics process: an innovation experience

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present the latest innovations in the drug distribution processes of hospital companies, which are currently dealing with high inventory and storage costs and fragmented organizational responsibilities. Design/methodology/approach - The literature review and the in-depth analysis of a case study support the understanding of the unit dose drug distribution system and the subsequent definition of the practical implications for hospital companies. Findings - Starting from the insights offered by the case study, the analysis shows that the unit dose system allows hospitals to improve the patient care quality and reduce costs. Research limitations/implications - The limitations of the research are those related to the theoretical and exploratory nature of the study, but from a practical point of view, the work provides important indications to the management of healthcare companies, which have to innovate their drug distribution systems. Originality/value - This paper analyzes a new and highly topical issue and provides several insights for the competitive development of a fundamental sector

Publicness, Organisational Characteristics and Performance

This paper reports an exploratory study utilising a publicness model in which the impact of ownership, funding and mode of control on performance is moderated by organisational characteristics such as goals, structure and management. It describes the testing in 164 English hospital pharmacies of four health sector-relevant characteristics; diffusion of ownership (number of owners), priority of financial goals, congruence of core purpose (goals of sub-unit compared to organisation), and proximity of control (hierarchical levels between sub-unit and top management). Associations between these and four indicators of performance (managerial effectiveness, utilisation of human resources, work quality and employee satisfaction) were examined. Statistically significant relationships were seen between three of the organisational characteristics and some aspect of performance. Priority of financial goals was associated with perceptions of managerial performance, and proximity of control with use of human resources, work quality and employee satisfaction. Further elucidation of such characteristics may be justified.</jats:p

A Metaheuristic-Based Simulation Optimization Framework For Supply Chain Inventory Management Under Uncertainty

The need for inventory control models for practical real-world applications is growing with the global expansion of supply chains. The widely used traditional optimization procedures usually require an explicit mathematical model formulated based on some assumptions. The validity of such models and approaches for real world applications depend greatly upon whether the assumptions made match closely with the reality. The use of meta-heuristics, as opposed to a traditional method, does not require such assumptions and has allowed more realistic modeling of the inventory control system and its solution. In this dissertation, a metaheuristic-based simulation optimization framework is developed for supply chain inventory management under uncertainty. In the proposed framework, any effective metaheuristic can be employed to serve as the optimizer to intelligently search the solution space, using an appropriate simulation inventory model as the evaluation module. To be realistic and practical, the proposed framework supports inventory decision-making under supply-side and demand-side uncertainty in a supply chain. The supply-side uncertainty specifically considered includes quality imperfection. As far as demand-side uncertainty is concerned, the new framework does not make any assumption on demand distribution and can process any demand time series. This salient feature enables users to have the flexibility to evaluate data of practical relevance. In addition, other realistic factors, such as capacity constraints, limited shelf life of products and type-compatible substitutions are also considered and studied by the new framework. The proposed framework has been applied to single-vendor multi-buyer supply chains with the single vendor facing the direct impact of quality deviation and capacity constraint from its supplier and the buyers facing demand uncertainty. In addition, it has been extended to the supply chain inventory management of highly perishable products. Blood products with limited shelf life and ABO compatibility have been examined in detail. It is expected that the proposed framework can be easily adapted to different supply chain systems, including healthcare organizations. Computational results have shown that the proposed framework can effectively assess the impacts of different realistic factors on the performance of a supply chain from different angles, and to determine the optimal inventory policies accordingly

Sensitivity Analysis of Average Inventory Level (AIL) at a Specialized Hospital

. Hospital inventory management play a very significant role in hospital's performance. Too much inventory wiil lead to excessive inventory cost but too low inventory might result in dissatisfactions of patiens and lack of performance of physicians or doctors. Economic order Quantity (EOQ) is an inventory control method that can help hospital to minimize total inventort cost. However, managers might find difficulties in deterimining the right amount of ordering and holding cost which are needed in calculating EOQ. This research is a case study from a class “A” specialized hospital. Inventory data of pharmaceutical items are calculated to measure the sensitivity of changes in ordering and holding cost to average inventory level which will lead to understock or overstock. Different ordering cost and holding cost will lead to different proportion of overstock and understock but will not give a significant differences. This research recommend EOQ model to be used in hospital inventory management inspite of the difficulty and hesitation of hospitals to estimate ordering and holding cost

A hybrid approach for integrated healthcare cooperative purchasing and supply chain configuration

This paper presents an innovative and flexible approach for recommending the number, size and composition of purchasing groups, for a set of hospitals willing to cooperate, while minimising their shared supply chain costs. This approach makes the financial impact of the various cooperation alternatives transparent to the group and the individual participants, opening way to a negotiation process concerning the allocation of the cooperation costs and gains. The approach was developed around a hybrid Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS)/Tabu Search metaheuristic, resulting in a flexible tool that can be applied to purchasing groups with different characteristics, namely different operative and market circumstances, and to supply chains with different topologies and atypical cost characteristics. Preliminary computational results show the potential of the approach in solving a broad range of problems.This work is partially financed by the ERDF— European Regional Development Fund, through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within the project Flexible Design of Networked Engineering Systems (PTDC/SEN-ENR/ 101802/2008).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Energy planning for metropolitan context: potential and perspectives of sustainable energy action plans (seaps) of three italian big cities

Energy retrofitting of existing building stock and new expansion of urban settlements entail a new relationship between consumption and production sites. Especially, new production facilities linked to the renewables boom are not taken into account by the urban governance. Energy planning instruments could be the viable tool to manage the new energy transition focusing on territorial resources. The Sustainable Energy Action Plan is the most common and widespread due to its voluntary nature. The study analysed the SEAPs of three big Italian Cities to assess an integrated framework for planning renewables at the metropolitan scale

Sensitivity Analysis of Average Inventory Level (AIL) at a Specialized Hospital

Abstract. Hospital inventory management play a very significant role in hospital's performance. Too much inventory wiil lead to excessive inventory cost but too low inventory might result in dissatisfactions of patiens and lack of performance of physicians or doctors. Economic order Quantity (EOQ) is an inventory control method that can help hospital to minimize total inventort cost. However, managers might find difficulties in deterimining the right amount of ordering and holding cost which are needed in calculating EOQ. This research is a case study from a class “A†specialized hospital. Inventory data of pharmaceutical items are calculated to measure the sensitivity of changes in ordering and holding cost to average inventory level which will lead to understock or overstock. Different ordering cost and holding cost will lead to different proportion of overstock and understock but will not give a significant differences. This research recommend EOQ model to be used in hospital inventory management inspite of the difficulty and hesitation of hospitals to estimate ordering and holding cost.Keywords: Economic order quantity, sensitivity analysis, hospital inventory management, overstock, healthcare inventory management, holding cost, ordering cost, fixed order quantityAbstrak. Manajemen persediaan rumah sakit memainkan peran yang sangat penting dalam kinerja rumah sakit. Terlalu banyak persediaan akan menyebabkan biaya persediaan meningkat, namun persediaan yang terlalu rendah juga bisa mengakibatkan ketidakpuasan pasien serta rendahnya kinerja pelayanan dokter kepada pasien. Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) adalah metode pengendalian persediaan yang dapat membantu rumah sakit untuk meminimalkan biaya persediaan total. Umumnya manajer menemukan kesulitan dalam menentukan biaya pemesanan dan biaya penyimpanan yang dibutuhkan dalam menghitung EOQ. Penelitian ini merupakan studi kasus dari rumah sakit khusus kelas A. Data inventaris barang farmasi dihitung untuk mengukur sensitivitas perubahan dalam pemesanan dan biaya penyimpanan terhadap tingkat persediaan rata-rata yang akan menyebabkan kondisi understock atau overstock. Biaya pemesanan dan biaya penyimpanan yang berbeda akan menghasilkan proporsi overstock dan understock yang berbeda namun tidak akan berbeda secara signifikan. Penelitian ini menyarankan penggunaan model EOQ untuk digunakan dalam manajemen persediaan rumah sakit walaupun terdapat kesulitan dan keenggaran dari rumah sakit untuk mengestimasi biaya pemesanan dan penyimpanan.Kata kunci: Economic order quantity, analisis sensitivitas, manajemen inventori rumah sakit, overstock, manajemen persediaan di bidang kesehatan, biaya pemesanan, biaya penyimpanan, fixed order quan

Optimal Supply Network with Vendor Managed Inventory in a Healthcare System with RFID Investment Consideration

Supply Chain Management in the healthcare sector faces several significant challenges, including complexity in healthcare systems, high supply chain costs, balancing quality and costs, delay in delivery, product availability from vendors, inventory waste, and unpredictability and uncertainty. Among those challenges, having an effective inventory management system with an optimal supply network is important to improve the match between supply and demand, which would improve the performance of for healthcare firms. Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) system is a replenishment solution in which the vendor monitors and decides the time and the quantity of the inventory replenishment of their customers subject to their demand information exchange. A VMI contract in the location-inventory assignment problem is a decision tool for management in the healthcare industry, in which it enables the management to have a cost and service effective decision tool to critically re-evaluate and examine all areas of operations in a SC network looking for avenues of optimization. This dissertation is based on a real-world problem arising from one of the world\u27s leading medical implant supply company applied to a chain of hospitals in the province of Ontario. The chain of hospitals under study consists of 147 hospitals located in Ontario, Canada. The vendor is a supplier of three types of medical implants (a heart valve, an artificial knee, and a hip). In Chapter 2 of this dissertation, we present an optimal supply healthcare network with VMI and with RFID consideration, in which we shed light on the role of the VMI contract in the location-inventory assignment problem and integrate it with both the replenishment policy assignment and the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) investment allocation assignment in healthcare SC networks using both VMI and direct delivery policies. A numerical solution approach is developed in the case of the deterministic demand environment, and we end up with computational results and sensitivity analysis for a real-world problem to highlight the usefulness and validate the proposed model. We extend our research of integrating the VMI contract in the location-inventory assignment problem with the replenishment policy assignment under a deterministic demand environment to include the stochastic demand environment. The impact of the uncertainty of the demand as a random variable following two types of distributions, normal and uniform distributions, is studied in Chapter 3. Motivated by the lack of investigations and comparative studies dealing with the preference of dealing with VMI contracts to other traditional Retailer Managed Inventory (RMI) systems, we provide in Chapter 4 of this dissertation a comparative study in which we compare the total cost of the VMI system with another two situations of traditional RMI systems: first, a traditional RMI system with a continuous replenishment policy for all hospitals and with assigned storage facilities and second, a traditional RMI system with a direct delivery policy for all hospitals without assigning a storage facility. Computational results, managerial insights, sensitivity analysis, and solution methodologies are provided in this dissertation. Keywords: Vendor Managed Inventory, healthcare system, location-inventory, RFID technology, supply-chain network, stochastic demand, location-inventory assignment problem, and retailer managed Inventory

Sensitivity Analysis of Average Inventory Level (AIL) at a Specialized Hospital

Abstract. Hospital inventory management play a very significant role in hospital's performance. Too much inventory wiil lead to excessive inventory cost but too low inventory might result in dissatisfactions of patiens and lack of performance of physicians or doctors. Economic order Quantity (EOQ) is an inventory control method that can help hospital to minimize total inventort cost. However, managers might find difficulties in deterimining the right amount of ordering and holding cost which are needed in calculating EOQ. This research is a case study from a class “A†specialized hospital. Inventory data of pharmaceutical items are calculated to measure the sensitivity of changes in ordering and holding cost to average inventory level which will lead to understock or overstock. Different ordering cost and holding cost will lead to different proportion of overstock and understock but will not give a significant differences. This research recommend EOQ model to be used in hospital inventory management inspite of the difficulty and hesitation of hospitals to estimate ordering and holding cost.Keywords: Economic order quantity, sensitivity analysis, hospital inventory management, overstock, healthcare inventory management, holding cost, ordering cost, fixed order quantityAbstrak. Manajemen persediaan rumah sakit memainkan peran yang sangat penting dalam kinerja rumah sakit. Terlalu banyak persediaan akan menyebabkan biaya persediaan meningkat, namun persediaan yang terlalu rendah juga bisa mengakibatkan ketidakpuasan pasien serta rendahnya kinerja pelayanan dokter kepada pasien. Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) adalah metode pengendalian persediaan yang dapat membantu rumah sakit untuk meminimalkan biaya persediaan total. Umumnya manajer menemukan kesulitan dalam menentukan biaya pemesanan dan biaya penyimpanan yang dibutuhkan dalam menghitung EOQ. Penelitian ini merupakan studi kasus dari rumah sakit khusus kelas A. Data inventaris barang farmasi dihitung untuk mengukur sensitivitas perubahan dalam pemesanan dan biaya penyimpanan terhadap tingkat persediaan rata-rata yang akan menyebabkan kondisi understock atau overstock. Biaya pemesanan dan biaya penyimpanan yang berbeda akan menghasilkan proporsi overstock dan understock yang berbeda namun tidak akan berbeda secara signifikan. Penelitian ini menyarankan penggunaan model EOQ untuk digunakan dalam manajemen persediaan rumah sakit walaupun terdapat kesulitan dan keenggaran dari rumah sakit untuk mengestimasi biaya pemesanan dan penyimpanan.Kata kunci: Economic order quantity, analisis sensitivitas, manajemen inventori rumah sakit, overstock, manajemen persediaan di bidang kesehatan, biaya pemesanan, biaya penyimpanan, fixed order quan