Global inventory control in an academic hospital

During a recent study concerning the global inventory control in an academic hospital the authors faced the problem of a hospital management that wanted a very simple inventory control model, with good performance. It was requested that the members of the purchase department could understand the model and also that the model’s control parameters could be determined in a simple way, because of the database environment of the inventory control system. Since most items have a joint supplier and the orders for a certain supplier are always placed on the same day of the week the authors extended an EOQ model to a so-called (R,s,c,S) model, in which the values of the control parameters s, c and S determined in a very intuitive way. To the authors surprise, the performance of this rule was comparable to that of a rule in which the control parameters were determined in a more sophisticated way.