Understanding critical success factors of vendor-managed inventory in healthcare sector: A case study in Thailand

Abstract

ABSTRACT The healthcare sector is currently facing the severe global competition, resulting to improve its business operations by decreasing overall cost and enhancing competitive advantage. Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) system is one of the effective solutions as its benefits directly support on inventory cost reduction. The VMI implementation is essential, and key critical success factors (CSFs) are diverse. Large efforts are made based on VMI approach from literature; however, a generalized analysis on interrelationship among CSFs of VMI implementation is limited. This paper desires to fill this gap by a new hybrid MCDM model, comprising of Fuzzy Delphi and Grey-DEMATEL methods. The results present the identification of 10 influencing CSFs and their cause–effect relationship. Additionally, this study provides an important insight into managerial implication to improve inventory performance of Thai healthcare sector.