Applied Methodologies of Work Study, Forecasting and Inventory Management Techniques for Pharmaceutical’s Warehouse Management: Atlanta Medicare Co.,Ltd

Abstract

This research is a case study of the Atlanta Medicare Company Limited, a company with business operations in the form of a distribution center for pharmaceuticals. The distribution center has significant limitations in areas of shelf life, storage area, and employee work rate. Moreover, the business is in a sector that enjoys rapid growth caused by increasing consumer demand. Consequently, efforts are aimed at the improvement of working methods to eliminate the various problematic limitations and to capably and efficiently support increased work volumes in the areas of time and capital. The data in this research is obtained from observation of work practices. This includes the application of general problem-solving skills to identify bottlenecks in work operations, which links to industrial work study techniques, forecasting techniques, and inventory management techniques to analyze solutions for problems encountered in work methods at the bottleneck point. Timing data was recorded and mapped onto work process charts and workflow diagrams. The analyzed results is obtained by means of industrial study techniques, assisted in a comparative visualization prior to, and following, the improvement of work practices. Additional forecasting techniques are applied to assess consumer needs of certain items from a list of 47 pharmaceutical products, for Numerical Scoring combined with ABC Analysis principles. Monthly sales volume data is gathered from the past 18 months to analyze via the Minitab 15 program. Moreover, data obtained from forecasting is used to conduct an analysis of sales order volume with further inventory management techniques. The aforesaid methods reveals current problems in the pharmaceutical distribution center, particularly in the product categorization, sorted by items ordered. Moreover, the results from this analysis shows an solutions and improvements rendered to the working methods by means of industrial work study techniques include increase of 422 orders per month (24.10%), with a working time reduction of 1.74 min per order (19.42%) and an operating cost reduction of 489,032.02 baht per year (0.58%). The results from forecasting and product inventory management techniques also help minimize losses incurred in the inventory.