Healthcare Group Purchasing: The Case of Chalus City Drugstores

Supply chain management is a set of guidelines for integration of chains, which aims to reduce costs and increase system services to customers. One of the most important issues for supply chain stockholders is procuring and purchasing requested items in a timely manner. Thus, a variety of models have been proposed as purchasing strategy in supply chains. Group purchasing is a system which leads to decline expenses, such as ordering, administrative, transportation and purchasing costs. This research suggests a modeling approach that develops a purchasing group organization for a set of pharmacies in the field of healthcare. The proposed model determines a cooperation strategy based on various factors such as purchasing cost, pharmacies distance and demand difference within a given group. To illustrate the application of the proposed model, designing a purchasing group organization for Chalus city pharmacies is investigated.