Simulation-based analysis of lean practices implementation on the supply chain of a public hospital

Reliability of internal logistics distribution in a hospital

“…This finding is somewhat aligned with similar studies that integrated stochastic methods into traditional lean practices application (e.g. de Souza et al , 2018; Borges et al , 2020).…”

“…The adoption of lean healthcare (LH) has become a crucial necessity due to the increasingly demand of healthcare services and the constant budget reductions, which have undermined the quality of public healthcare systems (Aguilar Escobar and Garrido Vega, 2011; Borges et al , 2020). Lean healthcare has been applied focusing on different aspects of healthcare organizations; such as implementation barriers (Callender and Grasman, 2010), use of information technologies (Rogoski, 2006), redesign of processes or supply chain improvement (Kumar et al , 2008).…”

Pandemic's effect on the relationship between lean implementation and service performance

“…Analogously to the original concept of lean manufacturing, lean service seeks to systematically reduce waste and improve quality throughout the whole value stream of service organizations (Suarez-Barraza et al, 2012;Hadid and Mansouri, 2014). Evidence of lean implementation in services is prolific, with organizational contexts that vary from restaurants (Keyser et al, 2017;Alles et al, 2018) and educational institutions (Balzer et al, 2015;Allaoui and Benmoussa, 2020) to hospitals (Waring and Bishop, 2010;Borges et al, 2020) and banks (Oppenheim and Felbur, 2014;Bakri, 2019). In general, those authors conclude that lean services implementation positively impacts organizations' performance, enabling more flexible and effective operations oriented to customers' needs.…”

Proposition of a method for stochastic analysis of value streams

“…Due to the context of analysis (i.e. a healthcare organization), our findings complement the study developed by Borges et al (2020), which used a computational simulation approach to consider the variability of healthcare suppliers and customers as inputs to verify the effectiveness of the proposed inventory policies and service level achievement. This fact also raises attention to the specific benefits that healthcare organizations may obtain by incorporating the proposed method into their value stream analyses.…”