Performance indicator selection for operating room supply chains: An application of ANP

Abstract

Manufacturing and maintenance processes significantly benefit from effective and integrated Supply Chain Management (SCM). Recently, hospitals start to recognize the importance of these logistics initiatives to improve their operational performance while also maintaining high quality of patient care. Patient care processes are supported by a range of supply chain activities including inventory management and distribution of medical supplies to point-of-care locations. At the operating room for instance, the logistics staff’s goal is managing materials and information flows to have the requested materials at the right operating room at the right time, in the most efficient way. However, poor inventory management, lack of standardization and lack of coordination between departments complicate healthcare logistics processes, and hence result in many waste. Opportunities for efficiency gains in these logistics processes can be identified by measuring the performance of the internal supply chain. This paper presents a rigorously defined logistics performance measurement framework to evaluate the efficiency of logistics processes in operating rooms. The Analytic Network Process (ANP) is utilized as a popular Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) technique to provide effective decision-support models. The proposed ANP-based framework is a first step towards measuring the performance of operating room supply chain processes by selecting and prioritizing logistics objectives and associated Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Further research is required to validate the ANP framework by including multiple stakeholders’ preferences, as they may have conflicting views on performance definitions. The final goal of the framework is to support hospital logistics managers in making transparent and informed decisions to improve inventory and distribution policies in the operating room while considering all stakeholders’ preferences.