JIT Fulfillment for Healthcare, Explained

In healthcare, access to a wide range of medical supplies is essential for day-to-day activities such as wound care, surgery and diagnostic testing. From a logistics standpoint, that means that these supplies always need to be accessible for hospitals to function properly. Space constraints, especially in affluent urban areas, are at odds with this need. Hospitals have had to opt to allocate more space for patient beds and clinical areas at the cost of extensive inventories. As a result, they’ve begun to rely heavily on just-in-time (JIT) fulfillment systems to keep them operational.

In the JIT approach, hospitals have their supplies delivered directly to their facilities on a near-daily basis, reducing the need for large storage areas. In some cases, supplies can even be delivered straight to the point of use, such as nurses’ stations, effectively eliminating the need for internal storage.

In this ebook, we explore how hospitals can achieve precise inventory management, maintain optimal stock levels and reduce waste by implementing robotic warehouse systems and RFID technology into their JIT fulfillment strategies.