Title: Optimal shipment policy with ordering constraint for multi items in healthcare industries

Authors: C. Velmurugan; R. Uthayakumar

Addresses: Department of Mathematics, The Gandhigram Rural Institute – Deemed University, Gandhigram – 624 302, Dindigul, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Mathematics, The Gandhigram Rural Institute – Deemed University, Gandhigram – 624 302, Dindigul, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: Healthcare inventory management as one of the key activities of pharmaceutical supply chain logistics has always been a major preoccupation for the industries survival and growth. It has been used to develop models to meet products assembling and requirement and conditions of uncertain demand. We investigate the continuous review integrated inventory model which includes pharmaceutical supply chain between a pharmaceutical company and a hospital. In our model each product is assumed to be uniformly consumed in the hospital and continuously replenished from the pharmaceutical company. In order to control the ordering cost, crashing cost, backordering cost and transportation cost for all products the hospital making an ordering decision for multi products with ordering constraint which is considered as an equal number of shipments for all products. We present the numerical example and algorithm to find the number of shipment, the number of order, optimum size of quantity and total integrated inventory cost. Finally, we testing the effectiveness of the model based on the total cost.

Keywords: pharmaceutical supply chains; PSC; ordering constraints; lead time crash; backordering cost; inventory management; transport costs; operational research; shipment policy; multiple items; healthcare management; logistics; continuous review; hospitals; inventory cost.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMOR.2016.074855

International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research, 2016 Vol.8 No.2, pp.203 - 222

Received: 15 May 2014
Accepted: 26 Jul 2014
Published online: 21 Feb 2016 *

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