Hospital warehouse management during the construction of a new building through lean techniques

This paper shows a method applied during the reconstruction of an existing middle size Italian hospital. In fact, during this delicate phase, the project had a significant decrease in storage space and access gates for goods, medicines and medical devices. This aspect has a negative impact on road traffic. There was no consensus among the management on how to deal with this problem. In addition, a great tension between engineers and warehouse managers made it impossible to find a solution. For the best of our knowledge there is no available literature on this topic. Hence, a deep analysis had been carried out according to the Business Process Reengineering (BPR). For this reason, a hospital lean group has been created and a statistically study on storage volume inside the warehouse and a monitoring of trucks and goods arrival has been implemented. Three different solutions had been identified through data collection, design of experiments and lean application. The first one was focused on an exclusively internal management, the second one on an exclusively external management whereas the last one was focused on a partially internal scenario. Advantages, disadvantages, costs and the impact on the road traffic has been highlighted for each scenario. Afterward the Management had all the elements to make the best decision. The method reported in this study could be extended during the construction or reconstruction of any company that needs a warehouse or to face a problem in a tense atmosphere.