Simulation application for resource allocation in facility management processes in hospitals

Abstract

PurposeThe increasing percentage of aging population (longer life expectancy) and the changing financial policies in the healthcare systems put governments under pressure to optimize its healthcare expenditures without compromising quality. One way to cut down the costs is through improving and optimizing the facility management processes. This paper aims to focus on the issues surrounding this.Design/methodology/approachTo demonstrate the application of the research, service management (SM) process which deals with the building services related requests from the customer, one of the facility management (FM) processes, is taken as the focus of this paper. The study applies the lean principles to the SM process to identify the value added and non‐value added activities in the process. Process logistics flow is modified to comply with the lean theory. The collected data from six participating hospitals in Germany for the two months of the year 2002 are also used as inputs for the simulation model.FindingsSimulation is used to quantify the impact of the lean principles proposed changes on the system performance. The simulation analysis has proved to be an effective tool in the selection of optimum resources for the SM process in hospitals. The implementation of lean and simulation will assist the facility manager in the selection of the optimum crew size in various sub processes, thus eliminating the trial and error approach.Research limitations/implicationsTo develop a generic model for all categories of hospitals, substantial data are needed for the simulation model. In this paper, the SM process results from one category of hospitals are presented.Practical implicationsThe methodology can be extended to the other FM processes in different hospitals, with proper modification.Originality/valueThe simulated process model was useful to analyze “what if” scenarios for the decision‐making regarding optimum resource allocation.

Balancing scarce hospital resources during the COVID-19 pandemic using discrete-event simulation

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Integrating Augmented Reality into Building Information Modeling for Facility Management Case Studies

“…Considerable research works have looked into FM in the last ten years, which are mainly concentrated on the following aspects: Innovation process for FM (Mudrak et al 2005;Sharma et al 2007;Lavy 2008;Madritsch and May 2009), measurement system for FM (De Toni et al 2007;Meng and Minogue 2011), Enduser requirements for green FM (Nousiainen and Junnila 2008), and improvement for FM (Lennerts et al 2005;Leung et al 2005;Pennanen et al 2005;Lavy 2008). From the literature review, three main disadvantages have been identified in the state-of-the-art FM:…”