DOI: 10.36347/sajp

Pages: 257-264

Approximately 40% of annual hospital budget is spent on drug procurement. The objective of the study was to design and evaluate suitable inventory management formula for a community pharmacy attached to a tertiary care government medical college hospital. The duration of the study was 10 months. All the conventional inventory control techniques, such as ABC analysis, VED analysis, ABC –VED Matrix analysis, EOQ and SOS classification were done and their merits and demerits were identified. All these inventory control techniques along with the ROL calculation formula developed, was then combined together to develop a novel inventory control technique known as “AVSER matrix analysis”. In the AVSER matrix analysis model, A stands for ABC analysis, V stands for VED analysis, S stands for SOS classification, E stands for EOQ and R stands for ROL. A percentage error within 20% in the EOQ formula with respect to that of the actual consumption was considered to be accurate prediction. About 85% of the items were almost accurately predicted, 10% of the items were predicted in excess and 5% of the items were predicted in lesser quantity than the actual consumption by the AVSER matrix analysis of inventory control. When the ROL level for each item was fixed as half the value of EOQ, the reordering of all the items was found to be done at the appropriate time and none of the items in pharmacy reached the level of “No stock” over a period of 4 months. The AVSER matrix analysis model helped in giving a better priority management and economic forecasting of the items in a community pharmacy.