A decision-making-approach for the purchasing organizational structure in Moroccan health care system

Abstract

Excellence in hospitals supply management results in better quality, best prices, and good deliveries. One of the questions that come up as healthcare organization to capture the economies of scale in purchasing prices and process costs is whether their purchasing activities should be centralized or decentralized. In most cases, centralization strategy usually gives good supplier’s service with a lower cost, but the consideration of supplier’s cost in the hospital sector are mainly limited to visible ones. The high levels of hidden quality costs generated by suppliers and their unknown presence have serious consequences on the decisions made by the managers. However, the existence of this kind of costs has not been considered yet. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to propose a decision-making-approach, integrating a new method of measuring supplier’s hidden quality costs, in order to help managers to choose the appropriate purchasing organizational structure in the hospital sector.