Classification of pharmaceutical inventory by DISCOMS method

Pharmacies are one of the most important sectors that provide services within health institutions. In order for pharmacies to provide better service, stock control should be done correctly and regularly. Reasons such as the increase in the number of pharmacies, the variety of drugs, and the change in drug prices necessitate inventory management. Inventory management is the process of reaching the requested material in the right quantity and time. Classifying the materials can facilitate this process. ABC method is mostly used in inventory classification. While this method takes into account a single criterion, multi-criteria decision making techniques are widely used in inventory classification problems, since many factors are important in the classification of drugs today. In this study, the pharmacy inventory classification problem is handled with real data.Considering the criteria of 1139 drugs in the pharmacy inventory, cost, stock and profit percentages, the weights obtained by the EDAS technique were considered equal and the classification was made. As a result of the classification, there were 114 drugs in group A, 683 drugs in group C and 342 drugs in group B. In order to confirm the accuracy of the weight sets obtained by the EDAS method, it was examined how they affect the results in the sensitivity analysis. As a result of the analysis, it was concluded that expert opinion should be sought since it was determined that there was a change in inventory classification problems, even though classification was made with statistical-based weightings. Keywords: BWM method, Pharmacy ınventory classification, EDAS method, Stock management