Simulation application for resource allocation in facility management processes in hospitals

Purpose – The increasing percentage of aging population (longer life expectancy) and the changing financial policies in the healthcare systems put governments under pressure to optimize its healthcare expenditures without compromising quality. One way to cut down the costs is through improving and optimizing the facility management processes. This paper aims to focus on the issues surrounding this.Design/methodology/approach – To demonstrate the application of the research, service management (SM) process which deals with the building services related requests from the customer, one of the facility management (FM) processes, is taken as the focus of this paper. The study applies the lean principles to the SM process to identify the value added and non‐value added activities in the process. Process logistics flow is modified to comply with the lean theory. The collected data from six participating hospitals in Germany for the two months of the year 2002 are also used as inputs for the simulation model.Find...