Integrated Multicriteria Decision-Making Methods to Solve Supplier Selection Problem: A Case Study in a Hospital

Enablers of resilience in the healthcare supply chain: A case study of U.S healthcare industry during COVID-19 pandemic

Healthcare is considered one basic necessity to sustaining life; thereby, assessing the character of a healthy and resilient supply chain can help a nation develop ideas to combat the healthcare crisis. COVID-19 has led to a long-term strain on the healthcare supply chain (HCSC) and has resulted in a lack of basic healthcare necessities. It has become apparent that supply chain disruptions and increased usage has led to a lack of medical supplies needed to provide the proper care to patients. Multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) will help to indicate what characteristics contribute to resilient healthcare supply chains. To assess the characteristic of a resilient supply chain, significant healthcare supply chains will help indicate significant characteristics. A case study on the medical supplies’ supply chains is presented. A rank reversal proximity index MCDM method ranks criteria to assist with decision making. The proximity index will reduce the chances of the rank reversal phenomenon that results in incorrect rankings from occurring. Results show that redundancy, collaboration, and robustness are key indicators of a resilient supply chain while, supply chain design, communication capabilities, and supply chain risk management become comparatively less important during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, an unsupervised machine learning tecnique named "cluster analysis" is conducted to group the resilience indicators of the respective supply chain. Through this study, the best way to combat disruptions in the healthcare supply chain due to large-scale pandemics is to share information quickly, reduce reliance on the design of the supply chain, and track the usage of necessary medical supplies. Alternatively, we validated our study by comparing a Preference Selection Index (PSI) to the proposed method.

AHP, a Reliable Method for Quality Decision Making: A Case Study in Business

Decision making is a significant responsibility for business managers, their decisions impacting business performance. Managers are therefore interested in acquiring and implementing reliable methods for making decisions both now and in the future. Currently, in the countries in the Albanian-speaking regions of the Western Balkans, intuitive decision-making methods predominate. In order to find appropriate methods for assessing and prioritizing goals, new approaches to decision making should be adopted. Various methods have been developed for multi-criteria decision making. One of these is the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method—a method which should receive more attention than it has up to now. We would like to show that the AHP method could be of great use in decision making. Through a case study, this paper explores the AHP, a method with three levels in which the identification of decision-making criteria is based on the perceptions of managers and consumers. The paper’s findings offer an important guide for managers to improve decision making and enhance performance in competitive markets.

An integrated model for evaluation of maternal health care in China

In recent years, in the context of China’s continuous medical and health reforms, the health status of Chinese women and children has been significantly improved through the continuous efforts of staff at all levels of maternal and child health care institutions. Many indicators in maternal health care have improved significantly, but the speed and magnitude of changes have varied. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the dynamic changes in China’s maternal health status from 2004 to 2018, in order to determine whether China’s medical and health reform measures in recent years have improved maternal health. A total of 6 evaluation indicators from the data of China Health Statistics Yearbook 2019 were selected. Then, based on the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDA) methodology, the entropy weighted technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS), entropy weighted rank-sum ratio (RSR) method and the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation were employed in this study. In addition, sensitivity analysis was engaged to validate the stability and accuracy of the achieved results. The study results shows the ranking values of various methods were not exactly the same, but the overall trend was consistent. Overall, the maternal health care in China improved from 2004 to 2018 year by year, of which the top four were ranked from 2015 to 2018, and relatively poor from 2004 to 2006. This means that the policies and measures implemented in China’s medical and health reform in the past few decades have effectively promoted China’s maternal health care, and this will also provide a theoretical basis for future decisions to promote maternal health care.

An Integrated Organizational System for Project Source Selection in the Major Iranian Construction Companies

Studies show that procurement management and its processes strongly affect project success in the construction industry, because the project-oriented organizations in the construction industry prefer to buy goods and services from outside the project team and benefit from outsourcing. Hence, these organizations are continually facing different levels of procurement processes, and the establishment of a robust outsourcing system is crucial for success of their projects and development of their businesses. On the other hand, the housing projects are considered a significant sector of the construction industry in terms of the number of projects and the impact on the national economy. Traditionally, the key sources in conventional housing projects are the general contractors, the consultants and the suppliers. In this study, essential elements of an organizational system have been investigated by expert opinions and through the Delphi method, and all effective aspects of the source selection problem have been identified and integrated. Based on the research findings, procurement of housing construction projects should be organized in three organizational levels: development of the long list, preparation of the short list and selection of the most appropriate source by focusing on four main elements of the source identification method, criteria definition, evaluation arrangement and assessment model.