– The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to measure the service quality provided by a public health-care service provider using the lean manufacturing concept. The research shows that the adoption of lean manufacturing principles and methodologies may be used as a measure for efficiency. The relative efficiency measure concept is introduced.
– The inpatient and outpatient pharmacies providing medicines to the public at a large regional hospital in the southern part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were the focus of this study. The lean manufacturing concept is used as a method to improve the service quality and reduce the time needed to deliver the medicine by comparing the efficiency between these two pharmacies based on a metric used in lean manufacturing called takt time. A team was formed to study the current situation, and recommendations based on lean manufacturing were suggested for implementations.
– The research shows that the adoption of lean manufacturing principles and methodologies may be used as an efficiency measure to compare between different departments working under the same managerial system.
– The results presented in this paper are reliable, objective and may be generalized for measuring the relative performance efficiency between several departments providing the same type of services.
