Supply Chain Practices for Complexity in Healthcare : A Service-Dominant Logic View

Supply chain management has proven effective in other industries, but healthcare has found its adoption to be challenging and the reason behind it can largely be attributed to the level of complexity involved in the network. ‘Complexity’ has become a dominant feature of the lexicon of today’s supply chain management field, thereby making complexity management a key area of managerial consideration. This paper, in the context of hospital supply chain network, conceptualizes complexity dimensions as quality of relationship, volume and frequency of interactions in the network, number of elements, degree of differentiation among the actors in the network, and extent of interrelationships among network elements. The study investigates the influence of hospital supply-base complexity and customer-base complexity on key Supply Chain Practices (SCPs) using Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s (2004) Dialogue-Access-Risk Benefits-Transparency (DART) framework, linking it to dynamic capabilities literature from the value co-creation perspective, using the Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) lens