Supply and inventory
There are five main benefits of maintaining an inventory in a healthcare supply chain and these are investment protection, contract compliance, improvement of accuracy, enhanced efficiency and productivity, along with time and cost savings (Langabeer, & Helton, 2016). Some of these benefits can also be enjoyed by my current organization in case it chooses to maintain an inventory. For instance, when it comes to the benefit of saving on time and costs, a good inventory system will show those products that are fast-moving, and this will help in increasing the profitability of the organization, translating to a reduction in costs.
Apart from that, my organization can also benefit from increased efficiency and productivity. The use of the modern systems of keeping inventory such as the barcode scanners can help in significantly improving efficiency and productivity. The use of the said technology, in the process of maintaining my organizational inventory, can help in eliminating all the manual processes so that the employees can focus on other important things.
On the other hand, it should be noted that supply differs from inventory in that supplies are those items that make a business to run while the inventories are the items that are meant for sale to customers. Conversely, there is also the concept of vendor managed inventory and this refers to a business model where the buyer of a given product provides information to the vendor of the product, with the vendor, in this case, taking responsibility of maintaining inventory of the agreed material, and this is usually at the consumption location of the buyer (Coyle, 2009).
Last but not least, there are various factors in a manufacturing organization such as Toyota Motors Corporation that influences decision regarding inventory such as the cost. The quantity to be purchased has a significant influence on the cost. Besides that, logistics is the other factor that influences inventory. Some form of transportation has to be involved for the inventory to be stocked to the firm.
References
Coyle, J. J. (2009). Supply chain management: A logistics perspective. Mason, OH:
South-Western Cengage Learning.
Langabeer, J. R., & Helton, J. (2016). Healthcare operations management: A
systems perspective (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. ISBN-13: 978-1284050066