Hospital materiel management quarterly最新文献

Job satisfaction affects employee morale, which in turn affects employee productivity. Therefore, managers need to learn about contributing factors and use the factors within their power to improve job satisfaction. Extrinsic rewards, such as a high salary and good work benefits, are important, but studies show that how a job makes an employee feel is the greatest determinant of job satisfaction. Managers can influence the emotional effect of work on an employee through, among other strategies, recognizing the employee's efforts, providing opportunities for the employee to participate in decision making, and allowing the employee to grow professionally.

Small manufacturing companies have a hard time taking advantage of the price breaks that result from large purchase orders. Besides the greater amount of money involved, purchasing large quantities of items demands additional space for storing the items. This article describes a company that created separate inventory management and finance company to provide inventory management services to itself and to market these services to other small companies in its area.

Companies have tried to live without inventory integrity, but high performance and high profitability depend on high levels of inventory integrity. Good decisions require good facts, and inventory is often the most important fact upon which business decisions are based. This article explains how to attain an inventory integrity level of between 95 and 98 percent or even higher in 120 days or less and how to keep it there.

According to this article, many manufacturing companies evaluate their purchasing departments using inappropriate measures. One reason is that the measures chosen are easy to use. Another is that the companies tend to favor predictability, and they thus prefer numbers that they can try to achieve. But predictability is not always a virtue. In fact, an obsession with predictability can prevent the kind of flexibility that is often necessary to respond to changes in the market. The article suggests that the best measures to use in evaluating purchasing departments are behavior measures, not price, delivery, or quality measures.

Accurate inventory records result from careful tracking of in and out transactions. Regardless of how these transactions are done--by computer (backflush) or manually--they must be done correctly if accurate inventory records are to be the result. Cycle counting plays an important role in assuring that there is a sufficient inventory-tracking process in place to achieve accuracy. The purpose of this article is to explain how to use cycle counting to establish an effective process for keeping records accurate and how to ensure that it remains in place.

Despite the prolific implementation of manufacturing systems, JIT principles, Kaizen events, and cycle time reduction programs over the past few years, high inventories still plague many companies. The assumption that implementing these principles and techniques will automatically result in inventory levels that satisfy management frequently proves to be false. Events like mergers, introduction of new competition, and a dropoff in business often trigger edicts to cut inventories. The cost of inventories also extends beyond the traditional accounting measurements to include hidden operating costs that everyone should want to eliminate. This article looks at the reasons for inventories and explores strategies for reducing them.

In many companies it is not feasible to go to just-in-time (JIT) inventory management practices. In these instances, an aggressive inventory-monitoring program is a must. This article describes a program that resulted in a 75-percent reduction of inventory over a five-year interval. The topics covered will be applicable to those companies where JIT is not the answer.

This article describes the business relationship between a manufacturing company and a vendor that is a minimum-security correctional facility. In particular, it describes a set of revisions in the purchasing and delivery process that reduced the amount of paperwork substantially and also reduced the turnaround time.

This article provides an account of activity-based costing. It presents a general overview of this costing method, lists benefits and key concerns, discusses some of the impediments to its spread, and predicts its increasing use.

As manufacturers compete for a larger share of a shrinking market, cries for a better way of doing business can be heard resounding throughout the business community. Many companies are now looking toward these principles for help: working smarter, doing more with less, and supplying superior service. One area in which they can be applied successfully is stockroom management. Their implementation can result in positive, cost-effective changes. This article describes how a materiel control organization was able to meet the call for change and in the process increase accuracy, reduce cycle time, and enhance its commitment to providing "great service" to both internal and external customers.