Question

The instructions says: Evaluate the significance of logistics customer service in health sector and by showing it's role in decision making process. Motivate your answer way of example.

Answer 1

1.Evaluate the significance of logistics customer service in health sector and by showing it's role in decision making process. Motivate your answer way of example.

Healthcare organisations aim to serve the population when citizens need help with a health problem, which in logistics terms is to meet the customer demand. From a logistics perspective, patients pass different care functions, units, organisations and health facilities. Logistics management traditionally concerns the flow of goods but the core of healthcare organisations concerns the flow of patients. It is assumed that logistics management knowledge applied in healthcare can lead to:-

· lower costs

· shorter waiting times

· better patient service

· shorter treatment times

· Increased capacity.

The significance of logistic customer service in health sector:

· It facilitates the communication and understanding of all challenges related to the logistics and patient care unit interface

· It makes it easier to meet user needs

· It enables an active or even proactive participation in the standardization process and the definition of care protocols

· It allows for constant surveillance of new products and techniques

· Act as an internal support to clinical activities

· It helps the patient to get educated on the severity of their diseases and their medications.

· Also helps to know about the dose, route, time, interval, and storage of the medicines.

· They also helps to know about, how to use medical devices.

· Minimize the negative impact of the logistics or material management department, to a more proactive role, where logistics provides credible and significant support to the organization.

· Logistics customer service becomes not only a source of savings in terms of support services, but also renders clinical professionals more productive

Evidence for good logistic customer service

The emergence of the Resource Management function in the United States, which plays a value-added role through activities such as standardization, value analysis, management of contracts and vendor relationships.

In Drachten (Netherlands), when the Nij Smellinghe hospital faced a number of challenges in its OR and day surgery scheduling in the late 1990s, it assigned this responsibility to its logistics department. Logistics began to hold meetings to look at schedules for both the coming week and month.

Role of decision making by logistic customer service in health sector

Logistics is the entire process of:-

· Planning

· Implementing

· controlling the efficient flow and storage of materials and products

· services

· information

· energy

· people

and other resources that move into, through, and out of a firm (in both the public and private sectors) from the point of origin to the point of consumption and with the purpose of meeting customer requirements.

A logistics system is based on its definition and nature includes the following:

1. Storage, warehousing, and material handling

2. Packaging and unitization

3. Inventory

4. Transport

5. Information and control

Logistics decisions are generally made hierarchically, in an iterative manner from the strategic to the tactical and the operational.

Three logistics decisions in reverse order are:

Operational Decisions

Operational decisions are made in real time on a daily or weekly basis, so their scope is narrow. Decisions such as vehicle loading or dispatching, shipment, and warehouse routines are among the many types of operational decisions. These kinds of decisions are based on lots of detailed data and usually made by supervisors.

Tactical Decisions

Tactical decisions are made on a longer-term basis, whether monthly, quarterly, or even annually. Production planning, transportation planning, and resource planning. Logistics Operations and Management are the best known types of logistics tactical decisions. These decisions are often made by middle managers or logistics engineers and often with disaggregated data.

Strategic Decisions

Strategic decisions are business objectives and mission statements, as well as marketing and customer-service strategies. Therefore, they are long-term kinds of decisions made over one or more years. These decisions are made by executive administrators, top managers, and stockholders. The data at hand for such decisions are often imprecise, incomplete, and need forecasts.

Strategic decisions are made to optimize three main objectives:

1. Capital reduction (the level of investment, which depends on owned equipment and inventories)

2. Cost reduction (the total cost of transportation and storage)

3. Service-level improvement (customer satisfaction and order cycle time)