An innovative model to optimise inventory management: a case study in healthcare sector

In the age of competition, no industry can survive without pondering much about reducing expenditures wherever possible. Management of inventories represents one of the most important areas in business, trade and industry. The scheduling of production lots, as well as their sizing, is an area of increasing research attention within the wider field of production planning and scheduling. In the present paper a new mathematical model to find the target stocking level which minimises the total cost of the system while satisfying the service level constraint is presented. Starting from the analysis of inventory management models in literature, a completely original model has been developed and applied to a real case in healthcare sector. The analysis of the results, arising from the case study, allowed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed models and to highlight the differences. Nevertheless the proposed model has characteristics of generality that allow the application in other areas.