Understanding the UK hospital supply chain in an era of patient choice

Author Posting © Westburn Publishers Ltd, 2011. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy-edit version of an article which has been published in its definitive form in the Journal of Marketing Management, and has been posted by permission of Westburn Publishers Ltd for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in Journal of Marketing Management, 27(3-4), 401 - 423, doi:10.1080/0267257X.2011.547084 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2011.547084The purpose of this paper is to investigate the UK hospital supply chain in light of recent government policy reform where patients will have, inter alia, greater choice of hospital for elective surgery. Subsequently, the hospital system should become far more competitive with supply chains having to react to these changes as patient demand becomes less predictable. Using a qualitative case study methodology, hospital managers are interviewed on a range of issues. Views on the development of the hospital supply chain in different phases are derived, and are used to develop a map of the current hospital chain. The findings show hospital managers anticipating some significant changes to the hospital supply chain and its workings as Patient Choice expands. The research also maps the various aspects of the hospital supply chain as it moves through different operational phases and highlights underlying challenges and complexities. The hospital supply chain, as discussed and mapped in this research, is original work given there are no examples in the literature that provide holistic representations of hospital activity. At the end, specific recommendations are provided that will be of interest to service to managers, researchers, and policymakers

Optimal cash flow and operational planning in a company supply chain

International audienc

An Integrated Approach for Supply Chain Tactical Planning and Cash Flow Valuation

Part 1: Smart Supply NetworksInternational audienceThis paper presents a methodology combining a flow optimization and a cost models in order to, simultaneously, realize a tactical planning of a productive system, and evaluate the financial performance of the proposed plans. The system addressed is a multi-site, multi-product supply chain structure with finite capacities of production, storage and transport. In order to model physical flow, we propose an optimization model taking into consideration all the physical system’s constraints. It calculates production and transport plans while maximizing demand satisfaction rate. Then, in order to financially evaluate the solution found by the optimization model, we propose a cost model using Activity Based Costing (ABC) as a valuation method using cost drivers mechanism. Finally, in order to couple both optimization and cost models in a global integrated model, we use an approach called PREVA for PRocess EVAluation, generally used to set up a supply chain’s management control system using financial and physical metrics

Connections Among Optimization Models with Uncertainties, ABC and RBV

Optimization models (in particular, with uncertainties) and Activity Based Costing (ABC) and Resource Based View (RBV) of the firm theory are usually separated in theory and applications. We analyze the connections among them, with a focus on stochastic programming, showing how they can all be used as decision support instruments for strategic planning problems, especially concerning resources and services (or products). Such connections produce a multiplicative positive effect as we can use the potential of mathematical modeling with data from the ABC system and a taxonomy of resources from the RBV: the latter can also help us for the interpretation of results after applying stochastic (or mathematical) models and solution methods