Quintessa has recently completed a project for a company, implantcast UK, which specialises in the provision of artificial joints for orthopaedic surgery to hospitals. The project required the development of a bespoke and innovative approach to stock management of replacement joint components.
When a hospital requests an artificial joint, some components are delivered as a direct sale, while others are included in “loan kits” containing a variety of components of different sizes that collectively form the joint. The required components from the loan kit are determined at the time of surgery, with only a portion of them being used. The unused loan kit components are subsequently returned to implantcast for inclusion in future loan kits.
Loan kits, and direct sales, should be delivered as promptly as possible so that operations can be effectively scheduled, and patient discomfort minimised. However, the demand for artificial joint components from the hospitals is uncertain, as is the selection of the components that will be returned and the supply rate of new components from the manufacturer. This uncertainty, coupled with the fact that the artificial joint components and tools, which are also supplied, are expensive and so cannot be largely “over-stocked” to ensure that demand can be serviced, make this a challenging stock keeping problem that is difficult to tackle with standard approaches.
Quintessa produced a bespoke stock keeping solution for implantcast that calculates a target stock level for each component to help ensure that demand can be serviced, while keeping stock at a practical level. An algorithm was developed to predict a suitable target stock level based on a probabilistic assessment of rates of demand, return and supply for each component and was encapsulated in a spreadsheet tool that implantcast could incorporate in their stock analysis workflows.
Adam Dring, the General Manager of implantcast UK, noted that:
After evaluating various off-the-shelf software solutions for stock management, we realized our business needed a customized approach. We had the data and project objectives in place but required a partner capable of transforming these into an effective solution. Peter and Steven from Quintessa were a pleasure to work with. They quickly and accurately grasped the complexity of our needs and delivered a tailored statistical model that exceeded our expectations.