Can locker box logistics enable more human-centric medical supply chains?

Abstract

IntroductionThere are a range of non-clinical support services within hospitals, such as catering, linen / laundry and supply logistics, which are widely considered to have a significant effect on the delivery and quality of patient care. Supply chain activities are regarded as one of the most important owing to the potentially fatal consequences of 'stock-outs ' (Özkil et al. 2009;Costantino et al. 2010) where key inventory becomes temporarily unavailable. As a result, hospitals typically employ inventory buffers but in spite of such practices, stock-outs still occur due to disparities in inventory requirements between the hospital and suppliers; the presence of unusual demand for specific items (Jarret 2006); and, receipt of goods which are faulty, contaminated or otherwise unfit for purpose. In such events, the supply chain needs to be agile, responding quickly in order to cater for demand. However, due to the structure of the healthcare supply chain which consists of an external chain (delivering goods to the hospital) and internal hospital chain (distributing delivered goods to end users throughout the hospital), the fast flow of goods is often stalled by the interface between the two (Aronsson et al. 2011).

A simulated annealing approach to explore temporal consolidation of healthcare courier services to reduce carbon emissions

“…By comparison, in 2009 8% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S were generated by the healthcare sector [4]. Detailed analysis of carbon footprints attributed 65% of carbon generated by hospitals to the procurement of goods and services [3], which are widely regarded as inefficient [5][6][7][8]. Research into healthcare supply chains indicates this is largely due to the agile supply chain structure widely adopted in the industry, as it is more 978-1-4799-6058-3/14/$3 l.00 ©2014 IEEE suited to cope with unpredictable demand, considered inherent within healthcare, resulting in sub-optimal product flows, and low vehicle load factors, leading to high volumes of deliveries [8][9][10].…”

Locating Automated Parcel Lockers (APL) with known customers’ demand: a mixed approach proposal

“…APLs are a type of unattended collection-and-delivery point installed in public and private areas where parcels are retained for a limited amount of time until the customer can retrieve them by using a unique code (e.g., QR code, order reference number, a PIN code) (Lai et al, 2022) or a form of identification (e.g., credit card, government issued ID) (Schnieder et al, 2021). Consolidating the demand in APLs reduces the number of delivery points, increasing vehicle productivity and reducing mean delivery time (Bailey et al, 2013).…”