Improvement of medical consumables inventory management by simulation and optimization in hospitals

In market conditions that cannot be accurately measured and easily predicted, such as uncertainty in demand and lead times, fluctuations in prices, businesses have to keep certain levels of inventory in order to ensure the uninterrupted continuity of their operations. Inventory for health businesses that produce health service output as a result of business activities; means materials that must be found for examination, treatment and diagnosis and that directly affect human health. For this reason, the management of medical inventory is very important both for human health and for the financial continuity of hospitals. In this study, which examines the inventory management of medical consumables used in the operating room unit of the hospital, which is the subject of the study, and improves it with simulation and optimization techniques; firstly, the existing inventory management processes were defined. Then, the (s,S) inventory control model, which is one of the inventory models in the literature, designed to be an alternative to the existing inventory model and the existing inventory model of the operating room, was created and running in the Arena Simulation package program by using real-life data. In the last part of the study, the (s,S) inventory control model, which was designed as an alternative to the current situation, was optimized using the OptQuest optimization tool in the Arena Simulation program. The inventory costs of the materials were calculated by re-running the inventory model with optimized inventory parameters (s,S). Finally, the outputs of the three inventory models were analyzed and it was concluded that the lowest inventory cost value with 95% confidence level would be achieved by using the optimized (s,S) inventory control model and the current inventory model was insufficient in cost.