Buying Group Design Considering the Member’s Interest

Abstract

Enhancing the speed and competition in an exhibition of services and products motivated the companies to provide high-quality products to the customers. One of the effective strategies to reach these goals is to create working groups. These groups can help the companies to improve the quality and exposure of their services along with reducing the costs. This approach is applicable in the healthcare area as well. Group buying is one of the main strategies that many healthcare institutes are trying to control the costs and quality of their products. In this study, considering the objectives of procurement costs, the distance of drugstores and the member's interest to cooperate in a purchasing group is proposed. To optimize the model objectives simultaneously, the LP-Metric goal programming approach is utilized. Finally, the case study of drug's group buying is presented to show the proposed model effectiveness.