Blood Supply Chain: Logistics and Supply Chain Management

Blood Supply Chain
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Logistics and Supply chain management

Blood Supply Chain
Executive Summary
The is no industries in the world which does not require improvement in terms of supply chain
management. Blood supply chain is also one of them. In this report we have included logistics
and Supply chain related with blood supply industries in Australia, which solely handled by
national blood Authorities. We have tried to identify what kind of supply chain in it. How they
are doing inventory management, and how their distribution networks operate in all over
Australia. We have discussed a brief case study results about their reduction in cost using multi
variable linear programing. The result helps to reduce the significant cost in organization.
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Blood Supply Chain
Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................4
Supply Chain...............................................................................................................................6
Distribution Chain...........................................................................................................................7
Contract and Procurement...............................................................................................................9
Inventory management....................................................................................................................9
SWOT for NBAs Blood supply system.........................................................................................11
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................12
References......................................................................................................................................13
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Blood Supply Chain
Introduction
The cost of health care in Australia is growing rapidly like other countries. The cost incurred due
to supply chain system may goes up to 30% of total expenditure in hospitals (Alexander &
Eugene, 2017). From previous research it well evident that implementing supply chain practices
in healthcare industries reduce the cost in very significant manner. The operation in healthcare
industries are bounded by tight institutional and regulatory pressure. Due to this institutional and
regulatory pressure, the accurate forecast of sales can be determined with the help of lot of labor
and long term plan, this is mainly due to difficulties occurred in measuring the magnitude of
generic market player in this industries (Bolumole, 2009). The other reason includes that the its
product development cycle is longer than any other industries, due to longer development cycle,
the lead time also affect the capacity planning and managing supply chain industries. But most
significant challenge is, inventory management in this industry. Some product has very longer
lead time where as some product has very short lead time such as supply of blood. The blood
supply chain in Australia is governed by National blood authority of Australia. Its supply chain
process is named as Australian blood supply chain (ABSC).
The establishment of NBA was taken place in 2003, when national blood authority act came into
action. It is a government organization and working under Australian government health
portfolio, the prime job for this department is to manage and coordinates the supply of blood and
their product to the entire Australian territory. The organization structure of NBA is as follows.
Figure 1-Organization structure of NBA
The head office situated at Canberra, including 53 number of staffs, and 25 contract staff, whole
is managing whole Australia with their premium service.
Since as discussed above, the NBA deals with supply of blood and blood products. In the annual
general meeting, there is an approval process as per supply plan and budget is provided by the
Australian government, this budget is formulated based on demand forecast, which is done by as
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