The Practice of Supply Chain Management in Public Healthcare Sector in Kenya: the Case of Kenya Medical Supplies Agency

Abstract

Kenya Medical Supplies Agency (KEMSA) supplies healthcare commodities to government institutions since its inception in 2000. In 2008 a taskforce was constituted by the Minister for Medical Services to gauge its performance. Its findings showed that KEMSA's performance was below what was expected.The taskforce report largely attributed KEMSA's poor performance to financial and governance problems. This research was carried out to ascertain whether KEMSA had the requisite operational structures and competences to be able to fulfill its mandate.

Lockamy & McCormack (2004) and Reyes & Giachetli (2010) suggest that supply chain maturity models can be used as a diagnostic tool to determine the current maturity level of a system and identify areas of improvement. KEMSA's operational systems have been assessed for maturity and hence areas of improvement identified. The research findings show that KEMSA's supply chain is at the functional excellence stage of maturity. In this stage SCM processes are defined and documented, organizational structure remain traditional, performance is more predictable, SCM costs remain high, customer satisfaction has improved but still remains low and interdepartmental integration has not been achieved.

KEMSA will need to work on the improvements suggested in chapter 5 to take the supply chain to a higher level of maturity. Some of the improvements include: sharing information real time with all supply chain partners and employing cutting-edge technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and electronic data interchange (EDI).