Logistics and Supply Chain Management Quality Improvement of Supply Chain Process Through Vendor Managed Inventory: A QFD Approach

Abstract

Most of the time quality in healthcare is perceived as efficiency of services offered to the patients or end users. But at the same time quality is a main component of the efficiency of the process involved in the healthcare system. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) approach helps in translating the need of the process or customer to the implementation design QFD is applied to assess the importance and viability of VMI (Vendor managed inventory) for supply chain process. Main purpose of this paper is to suggest a quality improvement tool for supply chain process in a healthcare organization. One of the objective of the paper is to construct house of quality considering all the management’s expectation against technical parameters. A QFD approach is applied to assess the importance of Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) in supply chain process improvement. With application of QFD, house of quality matrix is constructed and helps in selection of most viable indicator which removes the ambiguity among indicator’s selection. A questionnaire survey is used as research instrument to find out ratings of the indicators. The sample size used is 30 and ratings are find on the basis of survey. As a conclusion VMI proves to be a vital player in quality improvement of supply chain process. For all the expected indictors VMI plays a vital role to bridge the gap. So with QFD approach, VMI is efficient tool to improve the process quality and in turn improves the overall satisfaction of end user from process.

Keywords: QFD (Quality Function Deployment), VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory), Healthcare Sector, Supply Chain Process, Process Improvement

View PDF