Every decision, every dollar, and every minute counts for healthcare procurement professionals responsible for negotiating complex service contracts, and ensuring a steady flow of life-saving drugs. A significant portion of that time also goes toward managing low-complexity purchases for the office, breakroom, environmental services, and other department needs. For many organizations approximately 25% of supply chain spending is allocated to these and other products.
Although such purchases are necessary to support daily operations, they don't exactly move the needle when it comes to patient outcomes or strategic growth. Nonetheless, supply chain leaders must balance this management with cost containment, quality assurance, and building supply chain resilience, even when facilities are understaffed and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of transactions. These issues not only slow down operations but also have the potential to introduce risk. Yet, it’s not uncommon to get bogged down in the details of purchase orders for toner cartridges and paper towels.
Fortunately, despite thin operating margins and constant pressure to do more with less, a growing number of procurement teams have discovered how to streamline purchasing and elevate procurement to a more strategic function that enables them to focus more on critical initiatives like securing new medical technologies, negotiating better contracts, and building a more resilient supply chain.
Leveraging Technology and Partnerships
The solution is not to eliminate non-critical purchases, but to change the way in which you buy them. Implementing a streamlined, technology-enabled system makes low-complexity buying simple and intuitive, so teams can concentrate more on high-value purchasing that directly impacts financial health and operational excellence.
The key is to use the right tools, like ones that provides the resources healthcare procurement teams need. For example, a familiar, user-friendly e-commerce experience combined with powerful business-specific features can give your team:
- Centralized Purchasing with Decentralized Access: Consolidate non-strategic spending onto a single, cohesive solution that streamlines operations. This gives individual staff buyers a simple, self-service interface that is linked to a product catalogue you’ve already approved. You can also customize spending limits and approvals to ensure compliance and block unmanaged spending. Having immediate access to the right products not only increases staff efficiency but also gives the central procurement team the ability to maintain control and have full visibility.
- Streamlined Workflows and Approval Guardrails: Create efficiencies in the requisition and approval process. Look for buying policies that can be configured to guide users to preferred products and suppliers. For example, the system could automatically recommend a more cost-effective generic brand of hand sanitizer or flag purchases that exceed a pre-set spending limit for a specific department. Automated approvals for low-value purchases can drastically reduce time spent on manual sign-offs.
- Data-Driven Insights and Strategic Sourcing: When all your purchasing data is funneled through a consolidated source, procurement teams can leverage analytics to identify spending trends, pinpoint opportunities for savings, and consolidate suppliers. Instead of reacting to individual requests, you can proactively negotiate better pricing on bulk orders, standardize products across the organization, and manage vendor relationships more effectively. This shift from transactional buying to strategic sourcing is where the real value lies.
- Wide Selection of Products and Competitive Pricing: Amazon Business provides a wide selection of products, from medical supplies and PPE to office furniture and breakroom snacks, all in one place. Business-only pricing, which often includes volume discounts, can lead to significant cost savings. Beyond pricing, Amazon Business centralizes hundreds of suppliers, ensuring product availability and giving organizations a wide range of options to get the products they need. This dramatically simplifies procurement and strengthens purchasing compliance across the entire organization.
- Streamlined Reconciliation: Seek tools that make reconciliation easier, , such as integrating with existing e-procurement systems that eliminate the manual work of matching purchase orders to invoices. This allows access to the external store while instantly routing the selected items back to the internal system to generate a formal PO, as well as a confirmation of goods receipt. This three-step data alignment eliminates the time-consuming task of manually cross-referencing documents, which gives countless hours back to your accounting and finance departments.
The Future of Healthcare Procurement
The future of healthcare procurement is not about eliminating low-complexity purchasing but simplifying and elevating it. Partnering with a technology-enabled supplier gives healthcare organizations numerous opportunities to effectively outsource the administrative overhead of routine spend. The process doesn’t replace procurement team members, but it can empower them with the time and resources they need to focus on complex, high-impact tasks like negotiating for capital equipment, managing critical supply chains, and ensuring your organization is equipped for future challenges.
Working from a familiar interface with a wide selection, built-in controls, and reliable shipping means:
- Reducing frustration and improving staff satisfaction
- Allocating valuable time for more important initiatives
- Reducing cost of processing thousands of small transactions
- Ensuring everyone quickly gets the supplies they need
- Gaining complete visibility into your organization’s spending — analyzing purchasing trends to generate insights that improve and scale purchasing strategy
- Allowing procurement professionals to shift their focus from reactive, transactional work to proactive, strategic sourcing
Whether it’s streamlining the purchase of a box of pens or a box of gloves, procurement leaders will not only save money but can also free up time to complete their organization's most important task: delivering exceptional patient care.
Visit business.amazon.com/healthcare to learn how your procurement team can save valuable time and money.
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