Recent challenges induced by the global pandemic COVID-19 have highlighted the critical importance of coping with a sudden surge in demand for front line healthcare services. Motivated by the success of lean implementation in manufacturing systems, this study attempts to apply the lean principles in healthcare delivery environments. The lean approach begins with the identification of seven types of wastes in any production or service system. This study attempts to identify and prioritize the present in hospitals. The study contributes to the existing body of knowledge in two ways. First, we identify the various sources contributing to the seven basic wastes in healthcare delivery. Second, we prioritize the seven types of wastes and the dimensions contributing to these wastes using a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). This paper used the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process approach, which is a well-accepted tool in MCDM. The study was conducted at select hospitals located in and around Pune city in India. We find that waiting, transportation, motion, and defects are dominant in adopting lean practices among the seven wastes. The findings of this study may guide hospital management in strategic planning in adopting a lean healthcare process. To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies to extract, and prioritise lean wastes within the context of the healthcare sector.
Engineering changes need to be done in a product because of design improvement, product and process optimization, government regulations, etc. Implementation of those changes in the production shop floor involves multiple stakeholders and functions within and outside the company. Engineering change management (ECM) is the process of communication between all stakeholders to implement and document the engineering change on the shop floor. This involvement of multiple stakeholders and responsibilities increases ECM lead time and creates a challenge for change implementation on the shop floor. This paper presents such a case of engineering changes for factory shop floor implementation. Causes like delay in decisions behind an increase in lead time have been investigated. Process automation solutions that can reduce the ECM lead time drastically have been proposed and implemented. The developed solution for tool selection and layout problems achieves almost a 66% reduction in lead time and helps the factory for process standardization and resource optimization.
In the process of selecting homes for residential use various factors play an important role. In our study, we are considering people working in the software industry in Pune City. People working with software companies mostly prefer homes in environment friendly locations. In the house selection process people evaluate several alternatives to make their decision. In our paper, we have proposed a systematic way of evaluating the alternatives using AHP.
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