Supply Chain for Regional Centralized Purchasing: An Application Model

Abstract

In Europe Health Organizations are progressively modifying their management models to rationalize expenditure in order to assure better levels of effectiveness and efficiency: many countries are going to centralize the management of goods and services supply. In this paper a specific model of centralized purchasing is proposed; it is particularly suitable in cases of severe economy suffering at regional level (e.g. Campania, Lazio, Calabria in Italy) or at national level (e.g. Greece, Ireland, Italy), that means in all those cases where the scale economies, obtainable by supply centralization, would be partly or totally compromised by the extra charges induced by the missing of contractual commitments. This work aims either to analyse such specific approach for centralized purchasing or to propose a simulation model based on Petri net, which could be useful for designing and managing similar case studies. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]