Dr. Prem Vrat

Abstract

This paper brings out the analogy of bionic supply chain of food and life support inputs to the human body with the supply chain management particularly from the inventory theoretic point of view. Human body takes oxygen, water and food as the basic material inputs to the human body which processes these fast moving inputs to sustain the human body by converting it into energy and blood. The analogy visualizes human body as a perfectly engineered system designed, created and sustained by nature. It develops analogies ofJust in Time (JIT) supply process for oxygen consumption and identifies this as a perfect example ofzero inventory system for a fast moving-vital material (oxygen) with zero inventory while the system maintains 100% service level ofthe supplies with no stock outs. It also develops analogies for 'essential' and 'desirable' category of inputs such as water and food and develops insights to support the rationale (based on inventory models), the need to defer water intake by an hour or two after meals. It also develops the rationale of fasting (may be once a week) using the planned backlogging inventory model. Finally it conjectures using the staggered supplies inventory model to find merits infrequent food intake in small quantities rather taking full lot size offood intake at one go. There are a number of hypotheses proposed in this paper using the analogy which can provide a new insight into management of food habits for a better performance of the human body. Perhaps these analogies can help medicalpractitioners andpersons interestedin human health care to conduct extensive experiments under controlled conditions to validate these insights obtained by the analogy of inventory flow modeling in human foodsupplychain both in theforward and reverse supply chain situations.

Keywords- Human body, supply chain, zero inventory, analogy, reverse supply