The continuous increasing of costs and the limited budgets is translated into a significant operative pressure for the hospitals. This sector has to deal with patient and material flows every day. Trying not to impair patient care, several healthcare centres have invested in the development of an infrastructure for supply chain and logistics technology since logistics’ improvements are translated into quality improvements (Bakker, 2004). Nowadays, firms are increasingly thinking in terms of competing as part of a supply chain against other supply chains, rather than as a single firm against other individual firms and a good opportunity for improvement is through a better cooperation with their suppliers and customers (Silver, Pyke, & Peterson, 1998). During the 1990’s companies start realizing of the benefits of outsourcing part of the logistics processes to an external service provider. The challenge for Third-Party Logistics providers is to provide their customers with services that add more value to their customers’ business than the customers would be able to achieve themselves. In this way, the service provider tries to improve the supply chain, for example, by introducing cross-docking facilities to eliminate unnecessary storage of inventories, or by redesigning the distribution network to optimize customer service levels. In this thesis it is done an investigation within a hospital –Franciscus Ziekenhuis- in collaboration with a Third-Party Logistics Service –Jan de Rijk Logistics. There are two main parts in this thesis: The first one is designated to understand and analyze the current situation and in the second one different possibilites of improvement are developed by using a third party logistics service. From the outcome of these analyses, the reader can realize of the current bottlenecks in the supply chain, the products and procedures that impact mostly the total costs for the hospital and the trends of improvement in short and long term.

Outgoing