Forecasting and Controlling the Food Supply System in Hospital Using Exponential Smoothing

Abstract

The satisfaction of patient care is an indicator of good performance in hospitals, one of which plays a critical role is a logistic serving of food. With the fluctuating number of patients, the hospital should be able to meet the demand for the number of patients each day. This study aims to build the system of forecasting and controlling the food supplies to determine the number of servings of food supplies in the next period. The implementation of Exponential Smoothing method is used to predict the number of servings should be available for the next period. Amount of food raw material is controlled using re-orders point model, it aims to anticipate the occurrence of stockout with the minimum amount of food provides should be available. The data were obtained from the requested amount of food during 212 days for three times, morning, noon, and night. Forecasting values using alpha parameters 0.3 and 0.7 with a minimum forecasting error calculation using MAPE for alpha 0.7 with a value 12.81% for morning time, 11.59% during the day, and 10.96% night time. Forecasting result not only can be used to allocate food supplies but also to control stock of raw material food.