Hospital Supply Chain Proposal

Hospital Glove Supply Chain Proposal

Darren Jung, Natasha Lalani, Sonia Oliver, Kristopher Tengberg, David Woolever

OPS/HC571 Health Care Operations Management

May 7th, 2012

Professor Gary R. Stone

Hospital Glove Supply Chain Proposal

In order to be an industry leader, organizations must master both inventory management and distribution. There is currently a bottleneck with the gloves the hospital purchases. Due to labor issues with the supplier, delivery has been inconsistent and the organization can no longer afford to rely on their distributor. International distributors in China may provide quality products and competitive rates where the organization can be confident the materials they need will be delivered on time and accurately. The goal of the organization is to have a cost effective and efficient supply chain where the needs of the organization are being met at the cheapest price possible. The organization constantly needs to evaluate their expenditures in order to minimize costs while satisfying all system wide needs.

Purchasing new gloves locally has become a huge expense for the hospital due to increase cost of material along with issues of on-time delivery. An alternate plan is to look into purchasing gloves from China where the cost is much less than the ones purchased in the United States. Since there are many types of gloves used in the hospital, the first tasks is to identify which glove is costing the most and which is having the delivery issues. The hospital uses gloves for medical and general purposes. Based on the analysis, surgical gloves have been identified as the highest costing item and having the most delivery problems. Surgical gloves can be found in the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC) which is a coding system that can be used across all industries, for all types of goods and services. The UNSPSC item code for surgical gloves is 42-13-22-03 (Langabeer, 2008).

The issue here is that the...