Managing Inventory on Blood Supply Chain

There is unbalance the amount of blood demand and the availability of blood for each component at Blood Transfusion Unit in Indonesia. As the result, this component run into inventory shortage so management need to maintain the strategy of blood supply chain for the patients. Purpose of this is to manage inventory on the blood component of Packed Red Cells which it to be the highest blood component requirement for patient in this case study. Managing inventory is done through several stages including forecasting method, safety stock, and re-order point. Finding of this study was obtained that exponential smoothing (α = 0.95) to be the best forecasting method. Then, to manage inventory, this agency need to prepared 34 blood bags for safety stock and 76 blood bags for re-order point. This results able to give recommendation to the Blood Transfusion Unit at Indonesia regarding with the number of blood component provided and how much re-order to be made at the time of reaching the lead time. Further study is suggested to conduct simulation method in order to evaluate policy in managing blood inventory and prepare scenario for optimizing inventory level.