Hospital materiel management quarterly最新文献

Certification of supplier generally means that the supplier provides acceptable quality, on-time delivery at the lowest cost. Companies have devised numerous methods, criteria, formats, and approaches to certifying suppliers. Many of these are too complicated, not understandable, administratively difficult, or fail to be objective. If you have struggled with how to fashion a supplier certification program and how to have suppliers effectively embrace your program, this article is for you. It describes how to reduce the requirements to simple one-page format; details; three basic measures of performance that deal with quality, delivery, and cost; and provides several measurement-driven improvement actions. Supplier certification provides a simple, objective, mutually beneficial method of achieving high-quality, on-time delivery at the lowest cost.

Although implementation of an assemble-to-order supply chain strategy can often improve customer service, the transition to an assemble-to-order system requires many new processes, organizations, and skills. This article, in describing how Etec Systems, a leader in patterning solutions for the semiconductor and electronics industries, has implemented an assemble-to-order strategy, illuminates some of the issues that will be faced by any company choosing such a strategy.

Companies are constantly looking for ways to increase their effectiveness and improve their bottom lines. One area of renewed interest is supply chain management. By managing their supply chains better, companies are able to become more flexible, offer defect-free products, eliminate unnecessary delays, and keep costs down. This article briefly describes the objectives of supply chain management and lists some of the tools that can be used to achieve them.

Merck is one of the largest manufacturers of drugs in the world. With emphasis on research and development and quality, it invents, develops, and markets a wide variety of human and animal health products. Merck-Medco is the industry leader in managed pharmaceutical care. Merck's productivity increases are largely attributed to procurement, inventory policies, capacity initiatives, and strategic alliances.

If a company can reengineer its business processes into modules that can be linked, unlinked, and relinked inexpensively, seamlessly, and instantly, it will be able to provide unique value to each and every customer. A modular approach presents a unique opportunity to create significant value and offer customers a proposition that is impossible or at least extremely difficult for your competition to duplicate. This article explains how to reengineer individual processes in light of the overall business strategy chosen by a company.

In the aerospace industry, typically 60 percent of a product's cost and 70 percent of the lead time are due to purchased material. To affect price and customer responsiveness, improvement initiatives must be extended into the supply chain. Many companies have developed supply base management systems that include long-term agreements with suppliers, partnering with suppliers in risk taking and product design, information sharing, and quality and delivery rating systems. The premise is that suppliers are an extension of the factory. But to take full advantage of customer-supplier relationships, the suppliers must be "developed" in the same manner as a manufacturing unit. Supplier kaizen is a method of bringing suppliers to the same level of operations as the parent company, through training and improvement projects, to ensure superior performance and nurture the trust that is required for strong partnerships. This article describes Sikorsky Aircraft's use of kaizen to improve its supply base management.

This article presents a case study of how General Electric's Lighting Division has used the Internet to dramatically improve purchasing and logistics performance. By applying new techniques and technologies, including an Internet-based "Trading Process Network," GE Lighting has achieved substantial benefits, including cycle time reduction, elimination of paper and mail processing, improved information sharing with suppliers, quality improvement, and cost reduction.

This article describes a program for increasing basic inventory record accuracy. The program can be implemented in 60 days, and its cost is likely to be free when the benefits are taken into account. The hardest part is selling people on the need to improve accuracy and keeping them motivated during the implementation.

This article describes the process by which one company was able to substantially reduce the amount of paperwork required for purchasing material. After considering all the variables that affected the amount of paperwork, it developed three different models to use in ordering materiel, one for materiel delivered by the vendor in standard containers, one for materiel delivered by a carrier in standard containers, and the last for materiel that is best delivered in variable quantities.