The benefits of switching from manual, paper-based processes for healthcare procurement, inventory management, and accounts payable are extensive. They include:
- Providing time and cost savings across the healthcare procure-to-pay process, including spend-to-budget accountability.
- Simplifying processes and reducing duplication and other human errors.
- Promoting transparency and accountability through real-time processes and in-depth, specific reporting that facilitates better coordination and understanding between healthcare purchasing officials and financial executives and their staff.
- Managing vendor relationships, keeping expectations clear and eliminating conflicts arising from unaccountable purchasing or pricing changes.
- Assuring better contract compliance through real-time monitoring and tracking.
- Empower smart human resources and hiring/staffing by making onboarding easy, ensuring hours spent at work are spent smartly, and encouraging retention of valued healthcare staff by removing frustrations and roadblocks.
When choosing automated procure-to-pay software solutions, healthcare leaders and executives have factors to weigh including cost, functionality, and capabilities, and their automated solution’s familiarity with the pressures, procedures, and regulatory environment specific to healthcare.
One hurdle that keeps some healthcare organizations from pursuing an automated software solution is uncertainty and anxiety around the implementation process. Procurement, inventory, and invoicing are among the most important core functions in healthcare, and any interruptions or errors can be challenging and stressful.
It’s important to know that implementation of P2P automation can, with the right partner, be relatively pain-free, especially if decision-makers and their central teams understand the factors that go into success, including:
- Working together with a software-as-a-service company that provides a defined product roadmap as well as a clear schedule and timeline for how the implementation is going to proceed. This should include defined stages of implementation, guidance for how to get started, and expectations around how often you’ll meet and check in.
- Concrete plans around defining the functions you want and need, how workflows are going to be defined, and how to transfer vendor information and budget and general ledger numbers.
- Technological integrations around core financial functions in purchasing, budgeting, bookkeeping, and inventory management. These integrations have to be seamless, automatic, and trouble-free.
- Understanding training and support, including who will have access to the P2P automated system, who will be trained in during implementation, who will have approvals for functions such as purchasing approvals, and who in your organization will have access and oversight into decisions large and small.
- Whether or not your proposed P2P software solution was designed with healthcare specifically in mind, and whether you will have a wide range of choices in which vendors you prefer to work with.
Implementation of Your P2P Automated Solution with Procurement Partners
Because Procurement Partners provides the only healthcare-focused procurement, inventory management, and AP automation platform for providers across the continuum of care, our implementation process moves customers from outdated manual processes to P2P automation with experience and care. With Procurement Partners solutions delivering the only all-in-one procure-to-pay software solution for healthcare, the process from the initial meeting to full implementation happens with maximum guidance, assistance, and support.
Implementing your P2P solution begins with an initial meeting that covers:
- Your healthcare organization’s current procurement, inventory, and accounts payable processes.
- Examining where the gaps in your current processes are that need to be addressed, in order of priority, with an eye toward what is working and what isn’t.
- Setting out a defined roadmap for your implementation, with deadline goals.
- Identifying areas where your organization is seeing the greatest time loss and financial loss, and looking toward how your automated solution will convert these into cost savings.
- Defining needed software functions and workflows, including which stakeholders in your organization will be involved in training and implementation.
- Going over a detailed list of your vendors along with their general ledger numbers and your budgets.
Regular implementation meetings will subsequently cover:
- Setting up all business roles, with an eye toward procurement process approvals and how to optimize streamlined functions.
- Identifying which alerts and reports best serve your healthcare organization, such as automatic dashboard alerts when budgets are being exceeded in real-time.
- Setting up automated invoicing procedures, including processing approval and coding, and how Procurement Partners solutions help you track whether you’re getting agreed-upon pricing from vendors.
- Spend visibility from budget to invoice, looking at time savings in processes, visibility in ordering, oversight within your organization, and all final approval workflows.
- Live, leader-led training for your organization during implementation, with embedded training and educational resources available for ongoing learning and quick training in times of staff turnover.
Procurement Partners combines human experts with expert software to maximize your results through implementation and beyond. Because we deploy the leading digital automation practices tailored to the healthcare sphere, we have to capacity and ethics to lead and assume the heavy lifting in the implementation process. We have the responsibility for automation built for your specific needs, to your specifications, and apply to save your healthcare organization money through complete visibility and control over spend.
Healthcare leadership knows that procurement is one of the handfuls of areas with the maximum impact on finance and spending. While implementation of a P2P automated software solution can appear daunting, the right partner can help you begin saving time and money immediately.
Looking to Reduce Your Annual Spend?
Procurement Partners helps customers reduce their annual spend by more than 10% with an easy-to-navigate procure-to-pay solution where users can place orders and process invoices for all suppliers. Procurement Partners is the leading procure-to-pay management system for post-acute, non-acute, and continuum of care providers and has helped organizations achieve 40%-time savings and 95% supplier contract compliance through automating the procure-to-pay process.
