Paving the Way for Warehouse Centralization in Healthcare: A Preliminary Assessment Approach

Abstract

Centralized logistics management is currently one interesting option for healthcare systems facing an increasing need to improve responsiveness and service quality while reducing costs. This work focuses on one aspect of centralized logistics, namely warehouse centralization and proposes a preliminary approach to assess material management in healthcare institutions as a first step towards decisions about the implementation of such a strategy. A list of variables and relationships between them characterizing warehouse material management are identified based on a literature review and knowledge of real logistics processes. Statistical analysis is then applied to assess the existence of such relationships in a set of healthcare organizations in order to understand the management commonalities that can stimulate warehouse centralization as well as the criticalities that could potentially hinder it. The approach is tested in a healthcare logistics system in Northern Italy. The results proved the ability of the methodology to identify the relevant issues the involved institutions need to work on when undertaking warehouse centralization strategies. The case warehouses revealed a good degree of commonalities in their management practices although three critical aspects were identified, namely a limited efficiency in human resource allocation, a high fragmentation of stock product demand and a relevant number of stock products with low annual demand. This work provides a methodology to increase material managers' awareness about the factors enabling successful centralized inventory strategies in the healthcare sector.

Classifying healthcare warehouses according to their performance. A Cluster Analysis-based approach

“…Such flows are measured as the number of order lines picked and prepared for delivery because, as already mentioned, the warehouses at issue are usually equipped with traditional storage racks accommodating entire unit loads. This makes the workload required by receiving and putting away incoming products significantly lower than that related to picking and packaging single outgoing boxes (Cagliano et al. , 2016).…”

“…Additionally, as part of financial and organizational benefits, the “Warehouse Stock Value” and the “Percentage of Urgent Requests” indicators assist in monitoring inventory management efficiency and logistics process standardization respectively. More recently, Cagliano and others (Cagliano et al. , 2016) develop a quantitative approach based on a pairwise comparison between logistics KPIs performed through regression analysis.…”

“…The issue related to performance has been gaining a lot of importance especially in the case of public healthcare systems that have been facing significant cuts of public financial budget (De Marco and Mangano, 2013) and consequently have to address more carefully their expenses. Within such an operational environment, this work could support comprehensive investigations of the managerial similarities and differences that can be considered as a first step toward warehouse aggregation in homogeneous logistics units (Cagliano et al. , 2016).…”

Supply chain risk management to achieve healthcare supply chain operational excellence: a fsQCA and PLS-SEM approach

“…Information sharing about sales forecasts, production plans, production progress and the stock level is the backbone of SCI and is crucial to avoid the bullwhip effect (Ellinger, 2000;Thome et al, 2012;Chen et al, 2016;McCullough, 2014). Techniques and systems such as vendor-managed inventory, just-in-time and Kanban can help enable SC integration and information sharing (Frohlich and Westbrook, 2001;Chaudhuri et al, 2018;Cagliano et al, 2016;Vereecke and Muylle, 2006). Therefore, we came up with proposition H3: H3.…”

A structured approach to analyse logistics risks in the blood transfusion process

“…As a matter of fact, the high severity errors causing adverse events frequently have their root causes in blood handling and storage activities. Moreover, logistics is in general recognised to be a central back end for efficient and effective provision of any health care service 13 . Although risk management is regarded as a critical component in the transfusion service, 14 a limited number of literature contributions systematically identify and analyse logistics risks.…”