As stated in the previous chapter of this study, this literature review shall include a thorough analysis of the data obtained by the researcher from secondary sources such as books, articles and other materials made available by the World Wide Web. Generally, the review of literature aims to look into supply management as perceived by previous researchers. Moreover, it would focus on the importance of this particular management tool to the members of the American Health Industry.
This chapter shall cover the following topics in order to present a detailed discussion of the practice of supply management, most especially among the members of the American Health Care industry:
(1) an overview of the theory and practice of supply management, including the basic concepts and definition of SCM, the key business processes that are usually included in this, and finally, the theories that had been used to support such practice; (2) the history of supply management, more particularly in the health care industry coming from the buyers in the basement to supply chain managers; (3) the challenges being experienced by the members of the health care industry, the said reasons behind other industries’ better management of their supply chain when compared with the members of the health care (e. g. Wal-Mart, Standard Numbers;
Bar Codes Technology; Global markets; etc), highlighting the current experiences of the latter with regard to the concept at hand; (4) the current problems haunting the American Health Industry and how this significantly affected the practice of supply management which shall be discussed in reference to the first item; and lastly, (5) suggestions on how these problems could be fixed in order to ensure the efficiency of supply management and how this could affect the future of the said concept in the Health Industry.