Combined Effect of Just-in-Time and Vendor Managed Inventory Elements in Hospitals

The hospital sector is moving toward diversification, which needs high product variety to meet demand variability, which leads to many managerial problems in production, planning, forecasting, inventory management, production system, and timely distribution. Hospitals must increasingly focus on gaining competitive advantage through effective management of their supply chains. Inventory performance directly connects to the success of supply chain management. This paper identifies various Just-in-Time (JIT) and Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) elements which are important to both the customer and the manufacturer (vendor) in the Indian context. The paper presents the relative importance and difficulties in the implementation of JIT and VMI elements in the hospital sector and verifies the data with the help of Analysis of Variance technique and also identifies the JIT and VMI elements which are most important and easy to implement in the hospitals.