| Back | Next |
In addition to patient flow issues intrinsic to health care, almost all healthcare systems also have material supply chains that are critical to their operations.
The company for which Phil performed this type of work regularly imported a large variety of lenses from the far east. Orders had to be placed at the beginning of each month and took three months to be delivered. To handle the transaction processing needed to manage its inventory, the company obtained a mini-computer based system. It was not possible to use that system for computationally intensive analytical processing, nor was it practical for them to buy an additional system to support the analytical processing needed to compute order quantities.
The company hired Phil to specify a procedure for determining monthly order quantities. Their goal was to minimize inventory costs, while ensuring that they had enough stock to meet customer demand a pre-determined percent of the time for each product.
Not finding an existing approach to meeting this goal, Phil:
All of this resulted in the company being able to maintain optimal inventory levels at minimal cost.
Besides the project discussed above, Phil more recently has been involved in helping the Sir Mortimer B. davis Jewish General Hospital analyze the potential benefits of using RFID to improve the hospital's inventory management processes and reduce the cost of those processes.
He is also has been involved in helping the same hospital design cross-docking operations and supply delivery routes for the hospital's new pavillion. As part of that work he co-presented with Said Benguerrah, Elliott Silverman, Isaac Shemoly and Virginie Tourte, Inventory Monitoring At The Jewish General Hospital, 2013 He also presented a short tutorial on Inventory Control Theory For Hospitals as well as a tutorial on on outsourcing