Purchase of prescription and OTC medicines in Slovakia: factors influencing patients' expectations and satisfaction

Slovakia is a country where the purchase of OTC (over the counter) medicines outside the pharmacy is not allowed by the government. This study aimed at evaluating patients' satisfaction and acceptance of community pharmacists. Customer's behaviour and expectations influencing the purchase of prescription and OTC medicines were analyzed. A structured questionnaire having 15 multiple-choice questions was used to analyze the descriptive parameters. Data collection lasted from January to February 2014. The sample size consisted of 357 high-school educated individuals under 40 years of age. The survey showed that the prescription and OTC medicines were bought equally. The participants reported a 96.0%, 96.3% and 90.2% satisfaction rate with willingness and approach of the community pharmacist, pharmacy services and provision of drug information respectively. As for the OTC medicines, 89.5% people considered the pharmacist an expert: 88.2% purchased medicines with pharmacist's recommendation, 97.8% needed a professional counselling and 97.2% required a pharmacist's guidance. As for the prescription drugs, only 72.1% considered the pharmacist an expert: 96.3% suggested that physician's prescription was significant and 88.3% considered pharmacist's guidance in the process of selection of prescription medicines nonessential. A comprehensible and respectable conversation was highly expected in regards to both the OTC and prescription medicines

Assessment of Product Variety Complexity

Product variety complexity assessment plays a vital role in system design, as it has tremendous negative effects on manufacturing complexity in assembly systems and supply chains. On the other hand, practitioners and researchers frequently consider the number of product variants as a sufficient measure to be used to manage this kind of complexity. However, as shown in this study, such a measure does not reflect all pertinent features of complexity. Therefore, the main goal of the paper is to develop a measurement method for product variety complexity that adequately reflects relevant relations between the portfolio of optional components and the number of product variants. As presented in the paper, the concept of information theory can be effectively applied to measure product variety complexity. Moreover, such a measure can also be useful to better understand this system’s properties in order to reduce the level of variety-induced complexity. As such, the proposed method can be viewed as a complementary tool for reducing manufacturing complexity in terms of mass customization. The developed complexity metric was successfully tested on a realistic design example

Influence of Manufacturing Process Modularity on Lead Time Performances and Complexity

In principle, modular or integral character of manufacturing lines depends on the topological designs of products and determined operation tasks. On the other hand, in specific situations there is an articulated need for modular design in smart manufacturing systems since modular layouts are a crucial step towards agile production via smart manufacturing. The aim of this paper is to explore how the modular layout relates to manufacturing lead time (MLT) and to operational complexity of smart manufacturing systems. For this purpose, topologically different models of alternative process layouts were simulated and tested, while MLT values were obtained using Tecnomatix Plant Simulation. The obtained positive findings of this research could be useful not only in selection of the most suitable process design from the alternative ones, but especially in deepening the knowledge and bettering understanding of the concept of optimal network modularity

Exploration of the optimal modularity in assembly line design

Abstract It is widely accepted that a proper structural modularity degree of assembly processes in terms of mass customization has a positive effect on their efficiency because it, among other things, increases manufacturing flexibility and productivity. On the other hand, most practical approaches to identify such a degree is rather based on intuition or analytical reasoning than on scientific foundations. However, the first way can be used for simple assembly tasks, but in more complex assembly processes, this method lags behind the second. The purpose was to create a methodology for selection of optimal modular assembly model from among a predefined set of alternatives. The methodology is based on exploration of the relations between modularity measures and complexity issues as well as the relationship between structural modularity and symmetry. Especially, the linkage between modularity and complexity properties has been explored in order to show how modularization can affect distribution of the total structural complexity across the entire assembly line. To solve this selection problem, three different methods are preliminary suggested and compared via a series of numerical tests. The two of them present the novel contribution of this work, while the third method developed earlier for the purpose of finding and evaluating community structure in networks was adapted for a given application domain. Based on obtained results, one of these method is prioritized over another, since it offers more promising results and precision too

Management of Product Configuration Conflicts to Increase the Sustainability of Mass Customization

An important role in product variety management is finding an accurate variety extent to which the product matches the consumer’s expectations. In principle, customers prefer to have more rather than less versions of a product from which to choose. This motivates producers to offer a richer variety of goods. As a consequence, it brings a large amount of manufacturing complexity, and configuration conflicts may frequently occur. In order to avoid a situation in which a customer will select mutually incompatible components, product configurators usually recommend corrective actions for generating valid configurations. Nevertheless, the presence of infeasible configurations in customer options are negatively perceived by customers, and therefore it has an unfavorable impact on the sustainability of mass customization. One way to solve this problem is to eliminate, or at least reduce, mutually incompatible components. When considering the fact that eliminating all incompatible components may cause a rapid decrease in product variety, then the reduction of incompatible components can help to solve the product configuration problem. The proposed method aims to find a trade-off solution between minimizing configuration conflicts and maintaining a sufficient level of mass customization. Moreover, two supplementary methods for the determination of infeasible product configurations are proposed in this paper. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed methods are demonstrated by two practical examples

Algorithms and Methods for Designing and Scheduling Smart Manufacturing Systems

This Special Issue is a collection of some of the latest advancements in designing and scheduling smart manufacturing systems [...

Axiomatic Design Based Complexity Measures to Assess Product and Process Structures

Definitions of complexity often depend on several circumstances, such as the nature of investigated complex system, the kind of complexity, the conceptual framework used for a study, the theoretical approach taken, and the like. In this paper, two complexity measures that are based on Boltzmann’s entropy concept and AD theory are proposed and described. The first measure quantifies product variety complexity and the second one focuses on process structure complexity. Such complexity techniques will be used to determine product platform complexity and related process complexity for early stage of design decision-making. The method focused on product platform complexity assumes that the distribution of FR-DP couplings offers a suitable complexity concept, which prescribes that coupled designs should be decoupled, if possible, since uncoupled design is ideal and a decoupled design is less good, while a coupled design is the least satisfactory. Analogically, the same principle is used for the purpose to quantify topological process complexity by transforming input components into process variables and product modules including final product into design parameters. Subsequently, relevant properties of these measures will be analysed by computational experiments. Finally, practical findings for mass customization practice will be presented