Question

The CoVID-19 Crisis has led to a need for rapid capacity expansion in ICU hospital beds with ventilator connections. Department heads of such facilities must have thought about the need for capacity many times - perhaps month by month - before March of 2020, but yet they seem to be severely short.

1. What aggregate planning strategy do you think most such ICU administrators were using?  
2. What aggregate planning variables are most useful in this setting?
3. Why is there now a problem with capacity?
4. How can demand management be used to offset capacity shortcomings?
5. How do you suspect aggregate plans of such units changed in March of 2020?

Answer 1

The ICU administrators are currently looking for sources to fulfillthe shortfall of ventilators. They are communicating with all the organisations which can make the ventilators available.

As the COVID number of cases are highly increasing and can not be estimated, aggregate palnning variable can not be calculatedfor such exceptional scenarios.

The proplem of capacity has come into picture only becuase most of the countries could not plan and estimate the future spread of COVID and how fast the same can increase. Earlier ventilator requirements was low however with increase in number of COVID patients the same has increased and created capacity issue.

The manufacturers of ventilators have to assess the demand currently across all locations and start manufacturing the same which will resolve the capacity shortcomings within short duartion.

Due to sudden increase and spread of COVID 19 the aggregate plan of such units has changed drastically. The COVID is one of the circumstances which are not predictable.