A Non Tradıtıonal Vendor Managed Inventory: A Servıce Orıented based Supply Chaın Modelıng in Health Servıces

Since 90s, the healthcare sector has changed rapidly. These changes oblige the healthcare sector to adopt the management principles applied by the other sectors. Many studies have been realized to reveal and emphasize the significant competitive advantage and cost reduction resulting from supply chain management (SCM) practices. However, the healthcare industry has been extremely slow to embrace these practices because of its own different nature. Principally, in healthcare sector, pioneers must perform a highly accurate work because the cost of an error may simply be someone’s life. In healthcare industry, “Right product must be in the right place at the right time” is really a must. Besides, the nature of this sector’s includes some barriers such as lack of executive support; misaligned or conflicting incentives; need for data collection and performance measurement; limited education on supply chain; and inconsistent relationships with group purchasing organizations and other supply chain partners. The paper describes a service oriented based Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) model to manage healthcare supply chain application. The proposed architecture has the capability to meet the contingency demand requirements of dynamic healthcare supply chain without affecting the pioneer’s workload. The design and implementation details of the SOA solution are given, which are supported through a software prototype. The core theme of this paper is to provide the best kind of process systems by using service oriented architecture patterns and to model a vendor managed inventory in order to ensure an effective management in healthcare supply chain management.