Roles of Industrial Engineers and Supply Chain Managers of Hospitals - Essay Example

? Roles of Industrial Engineers and Supply Chain Managers of Hospitals Introduction  The paper will be showing an argumentative report about the roles that industrial engineers will be playing in hospitals and management of the hospitals. Industrial engineers have gotten a remarkably wide range of roles that they play in the hospitals. For example, they help hospitals to manage space and foresee construction setups. If hospital management is able to utilize the services of industrial engineers, then these hospitals are highly likely to benefit from the skills that these people have. Industrial engineers have been trained to economize on space and be able to develop hospitals in a manner that all the facilities will be used comfortably. This paper will compare the roles that industrial engineers play in hospitals. It will also feature what they do to help the hospitals to make sure that the spending of the hospitals is toned down. This role is also performed by hospital supply managers. The supply managers also have a particularly significant role in the purchasing of the hospital inventories and manage the inventory of the hospitals. Supply managers are of immense help to hospitals since they can be able to minimize running costs of the hospitals. They also are able to give the hospitals noteworthy inventory management. They help in the stocking of hospitals and all the machinery that is used in therein. They also help in supply of the medicines, the food that the patients use in hospitals, and all the equipment and materials that are used in hospitals. In short, the supply manager is responsible for all the running operations in the hospital. Purpose statement (Thesis) Industrial engineering deals with optimization of the most complex processes and systems in the world today. This industrial engineering is concerned with the job of development, improvement, and implementation. It is also associated with the evaluation of the integrated systems of people, knowledge, the information, the equipment, the energy, the materials, the analysis and synthesis. The concept of industrial engineering overlaps different business oriented departments like the operation management in hospitals; the industrial engineering department takes the emphasis of the mathematical proficiency and the use of the quantitative methods in order to ascertain that the running of operations is done in a good manner (Schlick, 2009). Many hospitals are able to maintain the inventories of thousands of their supplies which range from bandages, syringes, drugs, surgical equipment, medical gadgets, and all forms of medical facilities and equipment. It is crucial when a hospital is well stocked because from this, noteworthy services are offered to customers, and when this is done, patients become satisfied with the services offered. In average, a hospital will require seven thousand stock keeping units in the in-house inventory every day. The supply costs run up to more than forty percent of the costs that are used to run the hospitals. The supplies expense becomes second after the labor expense in the operation of the hospitals. Industrial engineering is also known as systems engineering or operations management or even manufacturing engineering. These terms are used depending on the motives of the people who use the services of these engineers. In the health care department, industrial engineers are commonly referred to as health management engineers or health systems engineers. On the other hand, the supply chain management is just known by the name of the supplies that they bring to the table. For a hospital to be able to run efficiently and at a remarkably low cost, the hospital management has to look for methods to improve the services of the hospital. Moreover, the hospital management needs to try to keep the costs of offering these services at a remarkably low cost. The hospital management employs the services of the health care systems engineers or the industrial engineers to assist them to provide the best health care services to people. The industrial engineers are able to design and redesign the hospitals and services that the hospital offers. The industrial engineers offer the hospital labor the best allocations, and equipment is distributed in the departments properly, and they also do the simulating of the real system into a computer program that is used in these hospitals to offer the patients a particularly reliable service (Salvendy, 2001). Supply chain management is done in the healthcare facilities to ensure that the hospitals are able to run effectively and without lacking any supplies that the hospitals require. A hospital that at one time lacks some supplies is not able to run well, and this compromises various fundamental operations in that health care facility. The chain supplies management is able to make sure that all the medical departments in the hospitals get the equipment. And all that they require in time and sufficient quantities so that they are able to run efficiently. They also ensure that the different departments of the healthcare facilities are able to acquire the supplies that they require to treat and diagnose patients. In the supplies management, even an exceptionally small supply chain in the hospital is immensely valuable to the hospital, and it gives the hospital budget a particularly significant impact. Supply chain managers in the hospitals try their best to make sure that prices of the supplies are subsidized. This has led to the supply management lowering costs by ten to twelve percent. Moreover, they have managed to optimize the inventory to ten percent of all the savings of the hospitals. The hospitals that are able to use the services of industrial engineers are able to save more in terms of future costs and other effects. When a hospital uses the services of industrial engineers in the pre-design phase and the actual design phase of the hospital, it is able to work on a lesser cost in the operations of the hospital. Furthermore, the equipment that will be used in the hospital will require remarkably little maintenance cost because the industrial engineers make sure that it is installed properly and that the plans for the installation work is done adequately. Industrial engineers are also responsible for the planning of hospitals so that hospital operations are conducted in an efficient manner. The industrial engineers engage the supply chain management department so that they minimize the costs of the supplies in hospitals and are able to bring in the quality supplies and equipment. When this is done frequently, it ensures that the running of the hospital becomes economical and manageable. They should also ensure that equipment brought to the hospital is of considerable shape, hence durable. Durability should always be considered by managers as it saves a lot of running costs. Not many hospitals are aware of the importance and the value of the inventory or how they have to use the inventory properly. Many hospitals measure the inventory by only using three areas of the inventory. Many hospitals utilize the pharmaceutical inventory; they exploit the material management inventory and the preoperative services inventory. The preoperative services always account for more than fifty percent of all the supply chain in the hospitals; the pharmaceutical inventory accounts for more than one quarter of the whole hospital inventory, while the material management inventory accounts for fifteen percent of the whole hospital inventory. On the other hand, the industrial management accounts for all kinds of the inventory that the hospital undertakes. They check the quality of the supplies that are brought into the hospital. They ensure that the supply chain management can minimize all costs and still be able to give the best supplies of hospitals (Gattorna, 2000). The supply chain management of hospitals can consolidate the warehouses within the primary markets and make sure that they are within a reachable radius. They bring in the inventories, in the high cost areas, and they put them under the material management to control the inventory to be able to centralize the responsibility for the high value inventories. They are able to use the overall values of inventory, the expenses of the freight of inventory, and the outages of stock in hospitals. They are able to fine-tune the already existing systems to be able to facilitate the inventory management in opportune time. This inventory will be able to carry the cost and to fill all rates in the hospital. The supply chain management plays a significant role in standardizing the same inventory items when possible to help benefit the economies and be able to reduce the costs per every purchase order. They involve the industrial engineers and all the physicians in the process of standardizing the products that are preferred in the hospitals. By doing this, they are able to invent the reduction rate of hospitals, to contract the compliance percentage of the hospitals, and to buy the machinery of hospitals (Schneller, 2011). The supply chain management can order and get the inventory at low units of measurement when a need arises for delivery to the hospitals immediately to the departments to be able to remove the storage of the bulk quantities of supplies. This is done to be able to save the hospital space for storage and be able to keep the hospital to have a transparency in supplies. The supply chain management can take restock of all the dated inventory items with the new inventories in the back and place the old inventory in front of the usage of the hospitals. They are able to reduce the losses that are incurred in the health care facility by lowering the costs of the inventory. They improve the safety of patients and reduce the replenishment costs of the inventories (Schneller, 2011). When hospitals engage tindustrial engineers in a jolly agreeable manner during the time before the design, and the actual design of the hospitals, they make the hospital management improve the general performance of the hospital. This, in turn, improves the process of registering the patients, transferring the patients, management of hospital equipment, acquiring of medicines, and even employment of doctors to hospitals. Hospitals might suffer the weight of trying to implement the recommendations of the industrial engineers because the implementation process and cost are somehow expensive more than the actual cost of building a hospital without recommendations of engineers. If hospitals are able to implement these, then the cost of running the hospitals will be remarkably little in the long run. It will make the hospital minimize the costs of operating the hospital and this will help the hospitals to be highly efficient in providing health care services. The hospitals that will implement these recommendations have got the ability to provide the health care service well more than the hospitals that do not use the services of industrial engineers. Industrial engineers do not just design the hospital, but they are highly responsible to perform the measurements of the work for hospitals that hire them. They are supposed to take a study of the hospital and recommend to the hospital management of the number of employees that the hospital can be able to employ conveniently and without straining frightfully much. The industrial engineers do this to ensure that the hospital is able to accommodate the best number of employees and the patients that are brought into the hospitals so that the hospital does not become congested with people and that the resources in the hospital are available to the correct number of people (Hubner, 2007). The industrial engineers are able to allocate the employees to various departments by evaluating their specialties; this, in turn, helps the hospitals to maximize their resources. The industrial engineers are able to determine and estimate the number of equipment that will be deployed to various hospital departments. When this is done, quality services are offered to patients. They play a tremendously massive role in ensuring that the patients get their diagnosis results at a remarkably fast rate, and this increases the efficiency rate of the hospitals. The industrial engineers are also able to design and create simulations by using programs from computers about the various departments in the hospitals. The simulations help the hospital staff to be able to provide quality health care to patients, and this then adds value to the community. The simulations help in giving a guideline of the steps that are involved in hospitals and are supposed to be undertaken, including, from the first step, a patient who is entering the emergency department, how the patient is supposed to fill the papers that are required to show symptoms of patients, and to the end where the patient will be released from the hospital. The simulations also show how the patients who are being transferred to another department in the hospital is supposed to do the transition. This, in turn, makes the industrial engineers to be highly effective in giving their services to hospitals and helping the hospitals to provide quality health care services to patients. The top most responsibility for the industrial engineers to do is to model the actual system as a computer simulation that will help the hospital personnel to be able to give better health care to all patients. This simulation will ensure that the services of the hospital get to improve and that the inventories of the hospital are recorded, and they are properly accounted for. On the other hand, the supplies chain management department will ensure that the hospitals get to acquire the bestfacilities at subsidized prices and that the equipment will be effective in its work (Dyro, 2004). In conclusion, the role that industrial engineers play in the hospital and the health care management is a tremendously ambitious and massive. They help the hospitals to be able to manage the equipment and make the services that are being produced in hospitals are way effective, and they are done in an efficient way. Being effective and noteworthy, service delivery is the aim of any institution offering services to people because the better these services are, the more people will continue seeking these services. Poor service delivery is tantamount to failure as no-one wants to seek poor services. Therefore, any organization wishing to be successful needs to recruit potent industrial engineers to spearhead its operations. In the case of a hospital, it ensures that patients will be satisfied with services being offered. Moreover, it helps the hospital management to cut the costs of operating the hospital, and this saves money to do other projects. The utilization of industrial engineers also helps the supply chain managers to be able to manage their supplies and the making of the inventory by using the simulations that are designed by the industrial engineers. This will transform to a successful business. References Dyro, J. F. (2004). Clinical engineering handbook. Waltham, Massachusetts: Academic Press. Gattorna, J. (2000). Strategic supply chain alignment: Best practice in supply chain management. Farnham: Gower Publishing, Ltd. Hubner, U. (2007). EBusiness in healthcare: From Eprocurement to supply chain management. New Mexico: Springer. Salvendy, G. (2001). Handbook of industrial engineering: Technology and operations management. New Jersey: Wiley-IEEE. Schlick, C. M. (2009). Industrial engineering and ergonomics: Visions, concepts, methods and tools: Festschrift in honor of professor Holger Luczak. New Mexico: Springer. Schneller, Eugene S. (2011). Strategic management of the health care supply chain. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Read More